How do you build a natural history museum in a park? If you are Renzo Piano, you decide to lift up a piece of the park and slide the museum in under, as at the recently opened new home of the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco.
Piano, the renowned Italian exponent of technologically sophisticated architecture, has given the museum a 2.5-acre “green roof”. In a lyrical touch, its “hillocks” rhyme with the backdrop of hills in this famously up-and-down city, giving form to the underlying agenda of using technology to build sustainably. At the same time, the building also struggles with an important question about how architecture frames the meaning of nature.
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The academy
Founded in 1853, the academy claims to be the oldest natural history institution in the West. It is also the only one in the world with an aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum and a “world-class research and education programme” under one roof.
The building
After an earthquake in 1989 damaged its historic building, the academy raised funds for a new building to replace the old, on the same site in Golden Gate Park. Piano, a winner of the Pritzker Prize (the equivalent of the Nobel in architecture), was entrusted the design of the 410,000 sq. ft building (with an exhibition area of about 100,000 sq. ft) in 2000. Construction began in September 2005 and the museum was opened to the public late in September 2008.
Ecosystem experiences
Visually, the most striking exhibit must be the four-storeyed glass dome which showcases “Rainforests of the World”. You walk up a ramp that spirals around and through a live tableau of trees, birds, and butterflies. An elevator awaits you at the top. Here, you are politely requested to dust off any butterflies that may have come along for the ride, since the elevator is taking you down to the basement aquarium.
The slow descent below the waterline is memorable because of the glass wall of the elevator. As you are lowered into the Amazonian flooded forest, roles are reversed. The fish in the water “out there” now watch the people in the glass box coming to a halt.
The experience of walking underwater, looking up at the aquascape through a glass tunnel, is admittedly special. But the most pleasant surprise is the opportunity to actually touch many of the aquatic animals at the Discovery Tidepool.
This agenda of extending entertainment towards education is most clear in the Naturalist Centre (Level 3). You almost walk straight into it as you emerge from a memorable flight across the universe in the Morrison Planetarium. The staff at the Naturalist Centre are keen to help you find information on any scientific matter—never mind if it is 5 minutes to closing time. If they don’t know the answer, there are always the scientists behind the scenes, whom they will ask on your behalf!
Open museum of the green