OPEN INVITATION

摘要

If you were among the 11 million tourists to visit Baltimore this past year, chances are you took in at least one of the Charm City's Inner Harbor attractions — the National Aquarium, the reincarnated Power Plant restaurant and entertainment complex, or the mixed-use Harborplace festival marketplace. But until last May, you and most other visitors (not to mention most locals, other than school children dragooned by their teachers) would have been hard-pressed to go out of your way to take in the Maryland Science Center. Conceived in the aftermath of the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, the original fortress-like building, designed by Edward Durell Stone and completed in 1976, looked more like Alcatraz than a monument to the wonders of science. "When it was first built, you'd swear it was a correctional facility," says the center's CFO/COO, Dick Hesse.