Bay City News
A visit to the South Bay offers more than concerts at Shoreline Amphitheatre. Among the area's interesting spots are the Computer History Museum and Google's main campus, with its new Google Visitor Experience, in Mountain View, and the Foster Museum showcasing watercolor paintings in Palo Alto. All can be seen in a day.
Start at the Computer History Museum, which opened in 1996. Funded by Bill Gates, it's a multimedia experience that tries to cover 2,000 years of history.
The 25,000-square-foot main exhibition hall has displays exploring everything from slide rules to computer games to artificial intelligence. Many machines, including a Waymo self-driving car in the lobby, are on view.
Visitors can learn more about the exhibits using QR codes, or, if they prefer, take a tour with a human docent.
General admission is $19.50, with discounts for seniors, students, military, educators, and youths, and free for ages 7 and under.
Googleplex, Google's main campus, is about a mile away from the Computer History Museum. There's plenty of interesting art and architecture -- even the parking garage on Alta Avenue is a work of glittery art.
The free Google Visitor Experience -- with a public park, amazing sculptures, a cafe, and a Google store selling branded merchandise ($29 water bottles, $15 mugs and more)--opened in October 2023.
The eye-catching outdoor art includes Halo, a colorful pavilion designed by New York City studio Softlab to resemble light reflecting off soap bubbles. It is perched on a small hill across the street from the Gradient Canopy, the huge building where Google employees work.
Guests from Japan and Hayward on a recent weekday were among those impressed by the art and "very beautiful" scene.
The Orb, a giant, sculpted white ball made of 6,441 individual flat pieces of aluminum held together by over 200,000 rivets, is another hard-to-miss sculpture created by TheVeryMany, a New York art and architecture studio headed by Marc Fornes. Visitors are welcome to wander through it and figure out what it means.
Check out more art at The Foster Museum in Palo Alto, about a six-minute drive from Google. This museum showcases watercolors by British artist Tony Foster, whose plein air series called "Journeys" pairs grouped paintings with notes and symbolic objects that explore specific themes and places, from the rainforest in Costa Rica to the American Southwest.
In one room, there is a painting of an underwater scene from the Cayman Islands on the wall and a table with colored pencils and drawing paper for visitors who want to create their own art.
The Foster stands out in a light industrial district as the only plant-covered building on the block. Parking and admission are free. While the museum website requests that visitors make an appointment, a sign saying "walk ins welcome" was out in front on a recent Sunday.
Computer History Museum is at 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View; computerhistory.org.
Google Visitor Experience is at 2000 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View; visit.withgoogle.com.
Foster Museum is at 940 Commercial St., Palo Alto; thefoster.org.
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