n 1675, Anton van Leeuwenhoek peered into a microscope and discovered a world teeming with cells. In 2007, biotech company Amgen Inc. brought the wonders of that normally unseen world to life in a booth for the 2007 American Society of Nephrology conference. The Thousand Oaks, CA-based company and its exhibit designer, Mauk Design Inc. of San Francisco, simulated the experience of entering the human body on a microscopic scale to show how Amgen’s drugs combat chronic kidney disease.

Visitors accessed the exhibit by walking past a wall of bone marrow — actually a white honeycomb-like material — and entered a space covered with what appeared to be blood vessels and arteries. Made of theatrical fabric textured to resemble the membranes that line blood vessels, the synthetic vessels seemed alive with computer animations of blood cells, which were transmitted from projectors located in the walls and on nearby pedestals. Red, 3-foot-wide, vacuum-formed plastic “blood cells” hung like balloons from the ceiling and walls, while another cell was positioned atop a pedestal, where a projector hidden in its base displayed images that showed hemoglobin rushing oxygen to the tissues. Plastic inflatables, such as purple stem cells and blue receptor cells, hung from the walls and ceiling.

Despite the Amgen-in-Wonderland look, Mauk Design kept to a budget almost as small as the real-life cells it expanded for display — about $100 per square foot — by using, for example, an overhead structure from a previous exhibit, lightweight inflatables instead of costly Fiberglas structures, and relatively inexpensive gobos suspended from the ceiling, whose moving illumination helped create the illusion of a pulsing cardiovascular system. By magnifying the world inside our bodies, Amgen proved the cells that so astonished Leeuwenhoek almost 350 years ago can still enthrall jaded techno junkies today.e

Client: Amgen Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA
Design: Mauk Design Inc., San Francisco
Fabrication: General Graphics Exhibits Inc., San Francisco
Size: 50-by-60-feet (3,000 square feet)
Estimated Cost: $300,000
Estimated Cost/Square Foot: $100