The New Children's Museum in downtown San Diego's Marina District traces its origins to a 1983 La Jolla children's museum that relocated to 200 W Island Avenue in 1993 and reopened in 2008 inside a 50,000-square-foot building designed by architect Rob Wellington Quigley—one of California's first green museum structures. The curatorial model commissions contemporary artists to build full-scale, room-sized installations called playscapes that children climb, crawl through, and interact with, a format that sets the museum apart from exhibit-behind-glass institutions and aligns with the hands-on arts programming at organizations such as Ramon Ivey Creatives in the downtown arts-education ecosystem. Artopia: NCM Creative Studios offers workshops in painting, drawing, sculpting, and ceramics in a state-of-the-art pottery studio, while the Innovators LAB makerspace explores the intersection of art, design, and science. The museum's 2019 National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the IMLS recognized programming that shares audience crossover with multicultural institutions including the WorldBeat Cultural Center in Balboa Park. The most ambitious commissions are the artist-designed playscapes themselves—multi-month fabrication projects engineered to withstand thousands of daily interactions while meeting museum-grade structural and safety specifications.