Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science is a nonprofit educational organization located in Dallas, Texas, with campuses in Victory Park and Fair Park. In support of its mission to inspire minds through nature and science, the Perot Museum delivers exciting, engaging and innovative visitor and outreach experiences through its education, exhibition, and research and collections programming for children, students, teachers, families and life-long learners. The $185 million Victory Park museum, designed by 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis Architects, opened to the public December 1, 2012. The Perot Museum is named in honor of Margot and Ross Perot, the result of a $50 million gift made by their five adult children.

The 180,000-square-foot museum will feature five floors of public space with 11 permanent exhibit halls, including a children’s museum complete with outdoor play space/courtyard, and a state-of-the-art hall designed to host world-class traveling exhibitions. Other highlights include an expansive glass-enclosed lobby and adjacent rooftop deck; a multi-media, 3D digital cinema with seating for 298; a flexible-space auditorium; a Café; and a Museum Shop.

www.perotmuseum.org/

The Perot Museum originally began in 2006 as the Museum of Nature & Science, which resulted from the merger of the Dallas Museum of Natural History (established in 1936), the Science Place (1946) and the Dallas Children's Museum (1995). Following the merger, the museum was located in three buildings in Fair Park, featuring an IMAX-style theater, a fully functioning planetarium, an extensive exhibit hall, and its own on-site paleontology lab.

The museum was relocated in 2012 to a new facility at Victory Park. The former Science Place Building and Planetarium were closed, with the building for the former Dallas Museum of Natural History converted into a second campus for the Perot Museum.

The Museum has been named in honor of Margot and Ross Perot, the result of a $50-million gift made by their adult children – Ross Perot, Jr.; Nancy Perot Mulford; Suzanne Perot McGee; Carolyn Perot Rathjen; and Katherine Perot Reeves. The $185-million fundraising goal – which provided for the site acquisition, exhibition planning and design, construction of the new building, education programs and an endowment – was achieved November 2011, more than a year before the Museum’s scheduled opening, allowing the Museum to be built without incurring any debt or public funding.

Designed by 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis Architects, the building is conceived as a large cube floating over a landscaped plinth (or base) and is designed to inspire awareness of science through an immersive and interactive environment that actively engages visitors. Conceived by the architects in collaboration with Dallas-based landscape architects, Talley Associates, the plinth is landscaped with an acre of rolling roofscape consisting of rock and native drought-resistant grasses that reflects Texas’s indigenous landscape and demonstrates a living system that will evolve naturally over time.