The Eugenides Foundation’s staid exterior conceals a hidden world of color and light–one of the world’s largest digital planetariums. Mary Sinanidis goes behind the doors of this institution for a quick tour of the world of science.

Hop into a taxi on any given day and tell the driver to take you to the “Eugenides Foundation” or Evgenidio and chances are that the driver will reply, “ah, you mean the Planetarium”–or vice versa. The two are so closely identified with each other than if another planetarium were to open its doors in Athens, this could result in some confusion. Yet most of the Foundation’s 110 staff bristle at the implied assumption: “the Eugenides Foundation is not just the Planetarium!”
And they’re right: there’s also a dome theater for showing wide-screen films, a 1,800-meter exhibition space, a multimedia library, and conference center.
For his part, the director, Dionysis Simopoulos, says he doesn’t mind. “As they say in the United States, when you are given publicity, it doesn’t matter what is said–positive or negative–as long as they spell your name right,” he says with more than a hint of humor. The Planetarium, as he describes it, is a gift-wrap of sorts covering myriad other offerings aimed at keeping alive the legacy of the Foundation’s benefactor, shipping magnate Eugenios Eugenides.
It’s hard to imagine that Eugenides could have envisioned the extent of the impact the institution he created for the purpose of educating “young Greeks in science and technology” would have. The Foundation’s basic purpose was outlined in his will and set up after his death in 1954. The caretakers of Eugenides’s legacy believe it’s a “living, growing organism”.  
Located in a complex near the bottom of Leoforos Syngrou, by a new coastal park fashioned from some of the former Olympic facilities on the Faliro coast, the Eugenides Foundation from the outside looks as stern as its name sounds. Stepping into the Nikolaos Vernikos-Eugenides Digital Planetarium, you feel as if you entered the Foundation’s 1,420-square-meter womb. Even in his wildest dreams, Eugenides could not have conceived the thrill of a 935-square-meter IMAX screen with a three-dimensional 360-degree breathing life into the infinite secrets of the universe as they explode from the darkness of a 25-meter-diameter dome in what is now one of the world’s best-equipped digital planetariums.
The shows are spectacular, combining 3D virtual reality simulations of galaxies, planets, stars, and constellations against a backdrop of dramatic music. Audiences aren’t just observers: the 360-degree screen makes you feel as if you’re part of these great cosmic changes.
Certainly any visit to the Eugenides Foundation’s planetarium is educational, but its aim is not to teach–something impossible given the diversity of its visitors who range from pupils and students to senior citizens, scientists, and tourists.
“What can you teach 280 different people at each screening, each of them with different outlooks and levels of knowledge, who come to watch a forty-minute film?” says Simopoulos. “We just want them to sit back and marvel at the show.” The presentations have thus been designed for a target audience of sixteen years so it is understood by all ages, from ten to 110 years old.
 “If we can entice one out of every 1,000 viewers of the 400,000 visitors to the Planetarium each year to feel interested enough to investigate the subject matter in more detail, then we consider ourselves successful. That’s when we can say that the eighteen months spent creating that forty-minute film was time well spent,” says Simopoulos, who sees the Planetarium as the base of the Eugenides Foundation’s pyramid towards scientific discovery.
“I estimate that we get more than one out of every 1,000 interested in going that one step beyond the Planetarium,” he adds ushering me over to the next section, the Science and Technology Exhibition.

The art of science
While the Planetarium’s foyer bustles with people from all walks of life, it’s usually less busy at the Interactive Science and Technology Exhibition that allows for a hands-on approach to discovery. The three floors are divided into three sections–Communication: Solids and Matter; Sound and Images; and, Biotechnology.
The sixty-five permanent exhibits are a small sample of the offerings at Cite des Sciences et de L’Industry at La Villette, the biggest science museum in Europe. Though the Eugenides Foundation’s specimens are few by comparison, they are also less daunting for visitors.
“Seeing it in one go would take several hours and would be mind-boggling as there is a lot to fathom,” says Valia Lyratzi, who is in charge of the operation of the exhibition. “That’s why we have created ten different courtesy leaflets at the entrance with suggestions of routes to follow to get the most out of the display, depending on areas of interest, such as Matter and Light, DNA, Young Scientists, and so on. We believe that someone can just keep coming back and always find something new to investigate or something that can be explored differently.”
To ensure that visitors do indeed keep coming back there is always something new being offered with weekends jam-packed with rotating activities from the presentation of experiments to workshops to story-telling. “It is possible to spend the entire day here,” says Lyratzi. “It’s all a matter of endurance.”
“Our goal is to make science accessible to average people. The exhibition drives home the fact that science may be simpler than it seems. It’s a part of daily life and nothing to be scared of,” she adds.
The experiments, presented by an energetic and likeable trio of hip scientists, drive home the fact that science can be just as messy and fun as it can be clinical. Every other month, the experiments change theme, like ‘playing detective’ or understanding light or follow seasonal topics like Christmas.  Then there are the activities for children linking arts and crafts with science by making pendulums or snowflakes. And if exhaustion sets in, visitors can plunk themselves on pillows and listen to the story of a brilliant scientist’s life in a narration that often extends beyond science into the realms of history and philosophy.
The same scientists who present the activities mingle with visitors throughout entire day and respond to queries.  
“We usually sit around as a team and brainstorm to find ways in which to make the exhibition more enticing,” says Lyratzi. “We are constantly on the lookout for new ideas.”
Workshops like the two-day summer camps for fifth-graders and older that allow them to on a rotation spree through the Foundation’s offerings resulted from one such session. Indeed, every year the Eugenides Foundation offers something new and these events have become so popular that they are booked solid almost as soon as they are announced.
And while the exhibition might not get as many peeks as the Planetarium, all it takes is one look-in to get visitors hooked.
“Sometimes, we get angry teens on school excursions coming to the exhibition negatively charged because they had assumed that their visit to the Eugenides Foundation would be a Planetarium screening rather than the exhibition,” says Lyratzi. “Within a short while they are so enraptured by the things to do that they don’t want to leave.”
Escorting me towards the next stop on this journey of knowledge and discovery, she adds: “ten minutes is all it takes”. Reading and fact-finding come next.

Theories and relativity
The Eugenides Foundation Library currently have 49,000 members. Opened in 1966, it underwent a massive transformation in 1996 when it was expanded to include new subject areas with enriched material. But it wasn’t until 2004 that interest in its activities and offerings took off with the addition of activities such as book presentations, computer lessons, book-binding and digital illustration workshops, children’s  reading clubs and story-telling.
“People didn’t really know us,” says head librarian Hara Brindezi. “They thought we were a closed library rather than an open-access lending facility and they initially believed we stocked very specific, scientific-focused books.”
Being part of a “living organism”, like the rest of the Eugenides Foundation, the library could not help but expand. “Our main goal is not just to provide scientific literature but to create readers,” she adds.
Rightly so, for how can science stand alone in a multi-faceted world where all spheres of knowledge are meshed together?
Then, there are the offerings that are not visible to most visitors–scholarships, special publications, donations for education programs, conferences and research to which only the professionals are invited. But whether specialized or not, whether a mad scientist or just curious, there’s something for everyone at the Eugenides Foundation and many reasons to visit–again and again.