Over last weekend, an event appeared on Facebook purporting to offer discounted admission to the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, which opened this Monday. With no official affiliation to the Frost, spelling and grammatical errors galore, a connection to a strange foundation, and a request for money to be transferred directly to someone's personal account on a mobile payments app, it immediately looked suspicious. Yet over a hundred people had responded that they were attending. How many actually sent money via the app is unknown.
Okay, first thing, right off the bat, let's just admit the elephant in the blog. It's no wonder the brand new Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science almost went extravagantly broke and had to be bailed out during construction both by its namesake philanthropists and the government. This place is spectacular, and when it comes to science, technology, and architecture, the three aspects of the museum that really blow you away, being spectacular is always expensive. Really expensive. Other issues, of course, included problems with the contractors, a well-meaning staff that may have been in over their heads coming from such a significantly smaller institution, and others that have been covered in the media. But holy shit all that money made a great museum.
