A new science museum for children, planned near Heuston Station, takes its shape from an amazing natural phenomenon, says Emma Cullinan

It is obvious that architect Ciaran O'Connor knows children. You can visualise excited tots running up the ramps that he has swept around the side of his proposed science museum, known as the Exploration Station, which is set to go on site next year, if all goes to plan.

As they dash up the slopes, looking out of the lengthy windows that gradually rise in height as the ramps climb, they are not to know that this whole building has been designed in accordance with the mathematical and natural law of the Golden Section, or that the perspectives in the building are exaggerated through the use of effects employed by Andre La Notre in the Chateau de Chantilly gardens in France or that the air they are breathing is being brought in through natural vents.

This is essentially a building for children, but its design will work on many different levels, reflecting the complexity of science itself while also making a sometimes seemingly difficult subject accessible.

News that a children's science museum could be coming to Ireland will be well-greeted by those who have spent many happy hours in the London museum, W5 in Belfast (some of whose exhibits were designed by Martello Media in Dublin), the Amsterdam science museum, designed by Renzo Piano and the Calatrava dinosaur-shaped museum in Valencia, Spain.

Interactive museums, such as the one in Belfast, do just that. Here children (and, I admit, adults) can sit in a chair and pull themselves into the air using their arms (while passively learning about counterbalances and pulleys); can go cross-eyed looking at colours whizzing about on a screen; can keep balls flying seemingly unsupported through the use of air-blasts; and can build arched bridges that they can walk over, thus demonstrating how an arch supports itself and the function of a keystone.

O'Connor, an architect at the OPW (Office of Public Works), says that good circulation is crucial: his team has designed this building in a way that prevents you having to ask, when you enter, "Where the hell do I go from here?", as O'Connor says.

"When you enter the building it will be crystal clear where you go next," he says. And that could include sitting beneath an enormous drum hanging from the ceiling. Beneath here is an amphitheatre where you can eat packed lunches or listen to a presentation. Within this drum are more rooms, including a double height space giving the volume needed to demonstrate certain experiments.

The Exploration Station will be between Heuston Station and the Museum of Modern Art at Kilmainham in an area that is seeing new development nearby, to a design by Anthony Reddy and Associates. The Heuston tower by Paul Keogh Architects will also be in the vicinity.

The museum has been designed to be a strong presence here and its shape resembles a fossilised sea creature, not unlike a snail (conjuring up memories of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim museum in New York).

That shape derives from the Golden Section which stems from a mathematical equation - the Golden Ratio - which can be applied to many natural proportions, including human bodies and limbs, the spacing of branches, leaf veins and animal skeletons.

Such ratios have been used for centuries and were popularised during the renaissance when it was felt that ratios of buildings, and even towns, based on human proportions would be inherently pleasing. Leonardo da Vinci used it extensively in his work (and it turns up in the Da Vinci Code too), not least in Vitruvian Man. Architect Le Corbusier used it in his Modular Man (playing with the scale), while his Villa Stein seems to follow the Golden rectangle.

The Golden rectangle has been used by other architects, being a humanistic way of coming up with a plan, and it can be seen at the core of this building.

Imagine a circular line setting out from the centre of the rectangle and hitting its sides as it curves outwards, spiralling on along the same path: that's what creates this building's overall form.

While children visiting the museum may be neither here nor there about how the shape came about, they will always remember it.

And they will have fun in it. O'Connor, who co-wrote a publication called Space for Play, has studied the work of developmental psychologists, notably the Swiss practitioner Jean Piaget, and has designed a museum for all stages of growth; from the two to six year-old age group who are learning hand-eye co-ordination, through to six to 10-year olds who are developing a curiosity about how things work and who want to test things out for themselves, and then to the 10 to 14-year olds who have learnt reasoning and want to explore their intuitive and creative side (and emotions too!)

"Children are not little adults," says O'Connor, who has created child-sized elements but with sizeable surprises. "Children can respond to increments of scale," he says. "We played on proportions. They are not an afterthought - they are part of the design."

There are, for example, child and adult-height handrails in the building.

At the start of the ramp the windows are small but as they get higher, the glazing to the outside rises; the floor also widens and the internal view over a balcony opens up too: harking back to the false perspective used by André la Notre where trees were planted close to each other at the start of paths which, in turn, gradually widened along their length, to make a perspective seem more pronounced than it actually was.

As well as offering child-challenging but friendly design, the building is to be family-friendly too. O'Connor, whose team designed the Galway City Museum, says that museums can become tiring and with this in mind there are places for families to sit, in the main areas, plus smaller rooms where people can stop.

"You are not just treated as part of a herd, you can pause," he says. One place to stop is the tiered roof garden where there will be a bright windsock - entertainment and education.

There will be a more complex wind funnel though, in the form of a cowl that will actively manage ventilation through the use of centrifugal force: very scientific.

O'Connor is an advocate of incorporating elements seamlessly into an overall design rather than adding them in as an afterthought or tacking them on as a statement. Sustainable elements are a case in point. There will be photovoltaic cells heating the water and passive heating and shading through glazing and baffles but they won't be waving from the rooftops. "The whole building doesn't need to surrender to just one thing. Stick-on green bits are often used as a camouflage for not designing," he says. "Our green agenda doesn't want to take the leather-patch approach. Everything in the building tries to do two or three jobs."

Science has seen a drop in student numbers but this building may just help to change that. With its fossil-like shape (the design team used to call it "Sonic", after the hedgehog rather than sound-wave technology) and people-friendly nature, this building looks as if it will present the subject as something that is natural, humanistic and fun.