Renzo Piano’s concept for the new California Academy of Sciences was to lift up a section of the ground and tuck the building beneath it. By Mimi Zeiger
A green roof tops the new California Academy of Sciences, which opens September 27, following a three-year building process and an extensive exhibit build-out. Viewed from the tower of Herzog & de Meuron’s de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the lumpy green roof appears at once organic and alien. California native plants blanket the academy, and the biggest lumps suggest some of the volumes underneath: a planetarium dome 27.5 metres in diameter, and a four-storey-high rainforest biodome. The building fits surprisingly well into its context: the rolling forms, flanked by cypress and eucalyptus canopies, mimic nearby hills. It is a science and natural history museum topped with nature.
Museum master Renzo Piano’s concept was simple: lift up a section of the ground and tuck the building beneath it. However, the 38,000 square-metre building is enormously complex. Multiple systems – structural, seismic, green building, and life support for 38,000 animals – interlock seamlessly. The Kimball Natural History Museum, Morrison Planetarium and Steinhart Aquarium are conjoined in the new facility, where more than half of the public exhibit space has been devoted to the Steinhart Aquarium’s tanks. The demanding program includes interactive exhibits, research laboratories and offices (rescued from their previous spot in the basement and now filled with light), collections storage, a live penguin diorama in the African Hall, and, of course, shops and dining facilities (a restaurant and a café serving local and organic cuisine by notable Bay Area chefs). Additionally, the building is on track to achieve leed’s highest rating, which would make the institution the world’s largest public structure to obtain leed Platinum – a bold initiative led by architects and sustainability consultants Ove Arup & Partners. This includes such features as energy-efficient radiant floors, and a sunshade embedded with 60,000 photovoltaic cells encircling the building’s perimeter.
A habitat for bees and hummingbirds, the one-hectare living roof formally unifies the complexity, but it also encapsulates the academy’s history and institutional changes. The academy first moved to Golden Gate Park in 1916; the original Steinhart Aquarium was added in 1923, and the African Hall a decade later. Over the better part of the past century, as the institution grew, new buildings were added. The resulting museum, in the tradition of many natural history museums, was fortress-like, but not without charm for field-tripping school kids. When Piano and his team visited in 2000 for initial meetings, they’d escape to the old roof for a change of scenery, and, in a decidedly non-smoking town, a cigarette.
“The building was like a dungeon of darkness, a museum,” says Renzo Piano Building Workshop partner Olaf de Nooyer, who’s been on the project since day one. “Once you entered, there was no sunlight, and everything was artificially lit. You never knew where you were; you had no idea about the site; you were totally disoriented. Our only desire was to go outside. We’d walk up a little stair to the roof, and there were trees all around.”
That pastoral rooftop experience dominated Piano’s early sketches, and evolved into the overall building massing. Environmental sensitivity was critical to the design. At 11 metres, the new roof isn’t taller than any of the dozen old rooftops. And the new, pavilion-like building occupies a slightly smaller footprint (excavated two levels below for additional space), maintaining its previous relationship to the adjacent Music Concourse. More important, the architect wanted to connect the inside of the academy to Golden Gate Park and open up the exhibition areas to light, air and nature. Exploratory museum-goers can now follow Piano’s example and climb to a rooftop observation deck.
