Photo courtesy Miami Science Barge.

As the sun set over the Miami River on a recent weekday, Nathalie Manzano-Smith and her team of 12 scrambled to ready the Miami Science Barge for its maiden voyage.

Manzano-Smith, director of innovation at CappSci, stood near the vessel’s stern, holding her newborn daughter and keeping an eye on progress. She was flanked on one side by multimillion-dollar yachts passing beneath the Flagler Street Bridge, and on the other by an old shipping container filled with solar batteries and painted with graffiti. “If we imagine this as a house, the structure is finally built,” Manzano-Smith said, as workers installed boards that would soon support a “solar dance floor.” “Now, it’s time to move the furniture in and make it glamorous.”

When it opens to the public this April, the barge, a winner of the 2015 Knight Cities Challenge, will feature ecological exhibits that draw attention to South Florida’s untapped potential for sustainability.

Last week, following several months of construction, the barge was pushed from its worksite next to the Flagler Street Bridge, where Little Havana transforms into downtown, to just offshore Museum Park, adjacent to Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The Miami Science Barge is docked near the Perez Art Museum Miami. Photo courtesy Miami Science Barge.

Now, the CappSci team will assemble attractions and ready the platform for its opening.

“It’s definitely been a labor of love,” said Manzano-Smith, of the project that’s consumed her for the last 16 months.

Marzano-Smith and innovation associate Alissa Farina drew inspiration from a similar endeavor launched in New York in 2007 by Ted Caplow, the CEO of CappSci, a global nonprofit that applies science and engineering to issues of sustainability and communal well-being. After visiting the New York barge two years ago, Manzano-Smith and Farina returned home excited by the possibilities of a South Florida version. The CappSci team saw an opportunity “to build on Miami’s entrepreneurial energy in a green, sustainability-focused way,” Farina said.

Soon after, Caplow joined the project as lead designer.

“We’re in the Sunshine State,” explained Farina. “We’re in such a great place to take advantage of advances in energy.”

Cappsci hopes the barge will make more South Florida residents aware of how much electricity they use and inspire them to use less. It will host field trips, lectures and other events to help people discuss and understand environmental issues.

Powered by five solar arrays, one of which moves with the sun as if it were a sunflower, the 120-by-30-foot platform features little computer software — only the program that keeps its massive solar batteries humming. In the absence of screens and computer interfaces, the barge showcases a hydroponic farm, an aquaculture tank filled with mahi, a water-collecting cistern, and a gleaming view of Biscayne Bay.

Last year, the project was the only Miami winner of the 2015 Knight Cities Challenge, an open call for ideas to make the 26 Knight communities “more vibrant places to live and work.”

Knight’s Miami program director, Matt Haggman, described the barge as “an exciting way to connect and focus our community on creative ways to think about innovation and sustainability.”

The platform before its transformation into the Miami Science Barge. Photo courtesy Miami Science Barge.

Over the last year, the CappSci team has worked with Knight and more than a dozen other partners to make their vision for the barge a reality.

On a recent Monday morning, the barge finally made its way down the Miami River, passing through Little Havana, Brickell and downtown, before floating out into the Port of Miami, and then into the bay, towards its mooring at Museum Park.

With morning careening toward lunchtime at the new site, the CappSci team drove two 40-foot-tall beams into the floor of Biscayne Bay. Meanwhile, the sun climbed in the sky.

Finally, the gangway was fastened down, and Manzano-Smith and Farina crossed over, dancing.

Jesse Golomb is a South Florida-based writer and Venture for America Fellow. Email him at [email protected] and connect with him on Twitter via @Jessie_VFA.

To learn more about the Miami Science Barge, visit miamisciencebarge.org. The winners of the 2016 Knight Cities Challenge will be announced in April 2016.