SAN FRANCISCO: CA Academy of Sciences by Renzo Piano

[BTinSF]

Source: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2152/...041ba72a_b.jpg

A sneak peek at what's to come at new Academy of Sciences
Kevin Fagan,David Perlman, Chronicle Staff Writers
Saturday, October 27, 2007


Builders tried to retain the original feel of the old African Hall. Chronicle photo by Michael Macor



The front lobby of the building opens to a hugh atrium in the center of the structure. Chronicle photo by Michael Macor



Riggers and electricians gather atop the living roof of the Academy building where they are installing lighting systems. Chronicle photo by Michael Macor



Worker Jamie Perez walks through a tunnel that visitors will be able to pass through to see native fish and plant life of the Amazon Rain Forest. Chronicle photo by Michael Macor


Take a deep breath, science buffs - and get ready to be blown away.

The newly built $484 million California Academy of Sciences was officially turned over to academy officials on Friday, and the promise of things to come was as palpable in the air of Golden Gate Park as the smell of new paint inside the building itself.

The first thing that overwhelms the senses is the very entryway, which is essentially a huge wall of glass revealing the contents of the building as if it were presenting an intellectual feast. From the door, you can see two huge, exotic-looking domes, a glassed-in piazza with a roof so high it's tough to see the top, and enough aquatic pools to fill an entire shoreline.

Taking possession of the building simply means the two-year-long construction job is virtually done, and the exhibits and collections must now be installed. But it's easy to see what's coming by looking at the structures that sit ready for stocking.

And what's to come will essentially amount to a massive, working display case for the public. Newly renamed the Kimball Natural History Museum, the sprawling edifice takes the musty old, dark-halled concept of natural history museums and blows it wide open.

It is full of airy, glassily transparent galleries and research labs, and everything from the "living roof" of plants and birds and butterflies already at home there, to the heat-recycling systems, is aimed at making it one of the most environmentally friendly museums on the planet. The exhibits being readied push the old paradigm forward several expensive steps in many ways - from adding bubble-shaped observation windows for viewing coral reefs and sharks to presenting the nation's largest planetarium, with digital film quality so precise it will make visitors feel like they're flying through space.

The plans for every room, every glass-walled tank, and every exhibit of rain forest trees will bespeak the museum's basic mission: to tell the world how life evolved on planet Earth, how its diversity has spread across all the seas and continents, and how every visitor must come away newly committed to protect and sustain these infinitely varied life forms that are now threatened everywhere.

It was easy to see, during a preview walk-through this week, where all those 484 million dollars went. Even the construction workers were impressed.

"I've worked on a lot of construction jobs, but this one is special," carpenter Salvador Gonzalez said, awe in his voice. He was polishing a Brazilian Ipe wood rail, and the reverential care he took in the rubbing was reflected in the equally mindful finishing work going on all around him. The crews knew they were having a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

"There are so many different parts here. It's going to be a great museum," Gonzalez said. "I feel like it's a privilege to work on it."

The academy will officially receive the keys to the new building on Thursday, and filling the 410,000-square-foot space - 40,000 square feet larger than the old, seismically unworthy one - with 20 million research specimens and 38,000 live animals will continue well into next year.

Opening day for the public is scheduled for the fall of 2008, but within the next few weeks the first of the Kimball museum's exhibits will begin moving in, and the academy's scientists will start toting their equipment and precious specimen collections into their laboratories - some of them installed behind glass walls so visitors will be able to watch researchers in action.

"The biggest challenge to building this place was visualizing what it would look like, with so many curves and structures stacked on top of each other," said Jes Pedersen, senior vice president of Webcor Builders, which carried out the construction. "It was very difficult."

African exhibit

This hall is the first thing visitors will see when they turn left from the entryway. It has been rebuilt to emulate its 1934-vintage predecessor - only in a much improved way.

The 21 painted backgrounds of the much-beloved dioramas of animals in savannas, jungles, deserts and the like have been reproduced, but rearranged in geographical order to present a virtual walk through Africa. Plasma touch screens have been added, showing video footage of lions and other animals in the wild.

The beaux-arts tiles for the curved ceiling were also carefully reproduced, and two outer limestone walls - also adorned with beaux-arts carvings - were preserved whole as a link to the past. These, it turns out, are the only things on the outside that look like the old building; everything else is new modernistic glass, steel and cement.

"This hall will hopefully look very familiar to our visitors," said Stephanie Stone, a museum spokeswoman, as she showed off the museum. "It has been a favorite for many, many years, and people wanted it to look the same as much as possible."

Once visitors are through the hall, an entirely unfamiliar scene awaits: a 25,000-gallon tank containing the African penguin colony. Native to the coast of South Africa and Namibia, the exhibit's 18 penguins will dive and dip throughout a two-story-high network of artificial rocks, and after they've frolicked themselves into weariness, they will pair off and retire to eight separate rock nests. The academy is one of several institutions worldwide dedicated to preserving these threatened creatures.

Expeditions wing

This is where visitors will get to see a continuously changing exhibit of the specimens and displays the academy's scores of working scientists bring back every year from the globe-spanning expeditions the organization has conducted throughout its 154-year history.

The wing covers most of the eastern half of the main floor, and on opening day, exploration crews will roll out findings from trips to the Galapagos Islands and Madagascar, both historic and new. Finches, extinct insects, lemurs and tortoise shells dating back to the turn of the last century will join thousands of other treasures brought back by academy expeditions. The idea of this initial display will be to contrast the development of life on these two very different islands.

Galapagos is a fairly new volcanic formation that rose abruptly from the sea, so the species that evolved there did so independently. Madagascar, on the other hand, broke off from Africa a millennium ago, so it nurtured species that had already existed on its mother continent but have evolved ever since.

At the eastern end of the wing will stand an old friend from the previous academy building: the 30-foot-high Foucault pendulum, which illustrates the Earth's rotation by swinging steadily while the planet rotates beneath it.

Early childhood center

Every parent with a hands-on, active toddler will wind up in this spacious room on the east end of the museum, and be happy for it.

A replica of the good ship Academy, the schooner that undertook the academy's first, groundbreaking expedition to Galapagos in 1905-06, will stand in the middle for energetic youngsters to crawl upon.

An artificial tree with tree-house and burrows will also produce joyously scuffed knees, and on the opposite side of the room will be an underwater-themed exhibit with dress-up costumes.

"This whole room was designed to capture the active energy of young children and give them a nature-themed space to play in," said Stone.

It is also sure to give parents a few moments of breathing space while they watch their tots frolic.

Coral reef

At a depth of 25 feet, the living coral reef will be the deepest such museum reef in the world. It consists of a long, narrow trench in the floor of the museum. It is studded with fake stone - made, like much of the fake stone in the building, of Shotcrete that is sprayed in place - and acrylic observation windows have been cut into the trench's base. One that is sure to be a favorite is a bubble window that visitors will have to crawl into through a cement tunnel for a view of the reef's fish swimming by. Visitors will also be able to peer into the reef from the open top.

Some 1,500 colonies of coral, in a dizzying variety of colors from pink to green, are being grown right now at the academy's temporary downtown Howard Street labs on artificial rocks that were specially aged in the sea off Fiji for a year. Coral is a living animal, with algae embedded into its skeleton for nourishment, and moving it requires trucking the entire rock onto which each coral has glued itself.

Scientists will begin transporting the academy's 1,000 square feet of coral to the new building in December, and it will take seven months to implant it all. Some 4,000 live, colorful reef fish will be added to the deep end of the reef, and on the shallow end will live 16 stingrays and an assortment of bamboo and reef sharks and sea turtles.

Morrison Planetarium

This wildly popular standby has been utterly transformed. Now a 90-foot dome with a 75-foot screen as big as the one at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles - which was, until now, the biggest planetarium in the nation - Morrison will sport a new, extremely precise digital projector that will not only present the usual star displays, but also provide live feeds from NASA's planetary missions and other space ventures.

This means visitors will be able to watch in gigantic relief above, in front of them and around them, startlingly accurate films from the Mars rovers, universe-exploring satellites and anything else that academy managers think will rock their capsule while educating them.

"It really will feel like you're on a space flight when you're sitting here," Stone said. "You won't believe it until you see it."

The old planetarium seating arrangement has been replaced by 11 steep risers, which means viewers will have a straight-on visual shot at what's being projected, as well as the typical visuals above and to the side.

Living rain forest dome

Perhaps the most visually stunning feature of the new building will be the four-story-high glass dome that will house an exhibit of four rain forest habitats, all kept at a constant 82 degrees.

This dome will feature several palm and other trees soaring 70 feet high, and a winding ramp and an elevator will lead visitors to the four different habitats.

The first floor of the dome will imitate the rain forest of Borneo, with a live colony of bats living alongside snakes and flying geckos, frogs and lizards. The second floor will house Madagascar ants and chameleons, and the third floor will feature the birds and butterflies of Costa Rica, all flitting through the canopies of the dome's gigantic trees.

Finally, the basement will take visitors beneath a living mockup of a flooded Amazonian rain forest floor. To save visitors the trouble of swimming through heated muck, there is a long, acrylic tunnel that will allow them to stroll through and gaze directly into the bottom of the forest with its mangroves, soggy tree roots and freshwater fish.

Central piazza

This is a huge square in the middle of the museum, and it is breathtaking, with an abundance of natural light pouring in from its high glass roof and nothing but ceiling-to-floor glass walls on all sides, giving a 360-degree view of the museum's attractions.

Dinners and special events will be held here when the piazza is not giving regular visitors a well-lit respite.

The glass roof is cleverly vented, in the interest of green-conscious air circulation, at the very top.

Living roof

The entire top of the museum, with the exception of the piazza's glass ceiling, consists of the biggest sustainable roof in the world. It is essentially a planted garden stretching to all four walls, supporting 1.7 million plants, including California poppies and strawberries.

Counting the tops of the two domes - Morrison Planetarium and the living rain forest - the roof sports a total of seven soil hills, mimicking the seven hills of San Francisco. This serendipitously also echoes the seven hills of Rome - capital of the home country of the man who designed the new museum, Italian architect Renzo Piano.

California and climate change wing

The entire west end of this hall will highlight the wonders of the Golden State through exhibits ranging from Sierra Nevada gold and the skeleton of a long-extinct saber-toothed cat to a 75-foot-long blue whale hanging from the ceiling. The hall will also be home to the stuffed remains of Monarch, the famed grizzly bear who served as the model for the bear on the California state flag.

The rest of the hall will feature video footage, models and other displays designed to generate discussion of California's wildfires, shrinking snowpack and other natural events that are marks of global climate change.

Steinhart Aquarium

The academy's old, familiar Steinhart Aquarium will be a very different kettle of fish in its new incarnation. Instead of row after row of small, static tanks and a few big ones, life in the water world will be on display everywhere, said Christopher Andrews, the aquarium's new director.

"It's all about diversity," Andrews said, "and we'll show it in diverse ways - with fish and reptiles and amphibians and jellies and birds and even bats. We'll show how aquatic life varies in the varied environments of this water planet: saltwater fish in their tanks next to freshwater ones, fish that love warm water next to those that like it cold.

"And active researchers and docents will be everywhere, so people can get up close and really personal with the animals they're looking at. Diversity's the key."


To see what's shaping up at the new Academy of Sciences at Golden Gate Park, take a video tour with Chronicle science editor David Perlman at sfgate.com.


E-mail the writers at kfagan@sfchronicle.com and dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../MN0VT1MSO.DTL

[Frisco_Zig]

extremely exciting

I grew up going to the old Academy as did my Dad and my Grandfather and when I have kids there is no doubt we will be members (though I'm not waiting for that, I can't wait to go to this!)

Sometimes San Francisco can get things very right and this is one of those times.

[BTinSF]

^^^You know, I made it to the old Academy only once--for an AIDS Foundation staff party amidst the alligators--and I've never felt like checking out the temporary one, but I'm really looking forward to seeing this when it's done and open.

[Frisco_Zig]

That makes sense. Other than taking my nephew I never went
because it was certainly showing its age and wasn't really all that interesting for an adult. They had a lot of mid-20th century style figures of animals and early homo sapiens on the savanna sort stuff. Some bones, lots of cramped aquariums tanks but nothing to compelling.

It was cool as a kid though. The alligators and the two headed snake were favorites, then as we got older it was getting high to check out the planetarium's Pink Floyd show (embarrassing)

This new museum is really exciting as an adult on many levels from the state of the art exhibits to the new planetarium to the architecture to the living roof and the focus on sustainability. Cool 21st century stuff. Its going to be a mob scene. Lots of suburban people who rarely come into the City for much but Giants games will be checking this out with the kids

And I hate to make this political but it is so refreshing to see a rising cultural institution like this. Its nice to see that the obsession with illegal immigrant ID cards, drug addicts and homeless vagrants can cease sometimes and a grand cultural attraction for normal citizens and can be built

[BTinSF]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Zig

it is so refreshing to see a rising cultural institution like this. Its nice to see that the obsession with illegal immigrant ID cards, drug addicts and homeless vagrants can cease sometimes and a grand cultural attraction for normal citizens and can be built

Yeah, but like its sibling across the music concourse and the parking lot underneath, it wouldn't happen if San Francisco wasn't lucky enough to have a lot of very wealthy and philanthropically inclined citizens. According to http://www.holcimfoundation.org/Port...US_booklet.pdf $150 million of the cost has so far come from private donations ($90 million from Board members) as opposed to $120 million from the City. And, of course, the politically contentious parking garage was largely paid for by Warren Hellman.

[peanut gallery]

I, too, remember going to the old one as a child and look forward to taking my kids sometime soon.

BTW, what's embarrassing about going to a Pink Floyd show? Because it was a laser light show? I never went to one of those, but I have seen them in concert a few times. I would think a laser light show with their music would be really good.

[Frisco_Zig]

It was a joke. Pink Floyd, bad weed, 4 late adolescent guys, not a lady in sight and a laser light show

Whats not to love

[BTinSF]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Zig

Pink Floyd, bad weed, 4 late adolescent guys, not a lady in sight and a laser light show

Were you there too: 1969, the attic of our house near Duke's East campus in Durham, NC?

[peanut gallery]

Originally Posted by Frisco_Zig

It was a joke. Pink Floyd, bad weed, 4 late adolescent guys, not a lady in sight and a laser light show

Whats not to love

LOL! I think we've all had nights like that in one way or another.

[BTinSF]

The California Academy of Sciences' beautiful new living-roof may well spark a revolution
By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate
Friday, November 2, 2007



The hills rise like giant bubbles surfacing from an extraterrestrial pond: natural, yet somehow alien. Although they are dotted with native plants, the effect is anything but mundane. Instead they incite images of a revolutionary future — a place designed by intelligent creatures who have transcended the divisions between nature and culture. Welcome to the most natural part of San Francisco's new Academy of Sciences, its living roof.
Like zoos, nature museums have never really done it for me. Sure, I love to gape at the circling shark or the twisting rainforest vine as much as the next city bumpkin, but the clash between my appreciation for nature and this most unnatural of settings always undermines the experience. Too often, the dull rectangular rooms outfitted with square tanks, and filled with carefully staged fake nature, serve only to emphasize how little we've learned from our astounding planet. But Renzo Piano's architectural wonder breaks the square mold.

The museum is scheduled to open next fall, although it's architecturally mostly complete now. A tour of the ultra-environmental museum one moonlit evening last week reminded me that natural landscapes and the design imagination need not live apart.

The building itself — with its spherical planetarium and domed rainforest, high-tech piazza with suspended glass roof, and plexiglass tunnels winding through marine ecosystems — is innovative enough to banish the stuffy taint associated with natural history. It's also arguably the greenest museum in the world, built to achieve a platinum rating from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design's Green Building Rating System. But the undulating green roof, planted with four native ground covers and five local wildflowers, will be a destination in itself. And in some ways, these hills of 1.7 million plants growing in 50,000 biodegradable coconut husk trays comprise the most inspiring element of the whole museum.

The roof design has multiple functions. Implemented by architectural landscapers SWA Group, in collaboration with green roof guru Paul Kephart of Rana Creek Living Architecture in Carmel Valley, the garden is structured around a network of rock in mesh cages, which allow drainage and offer support to the coconut husk trays. The steep inclines of the little hills draw cool air into the central courtyard. Heat-sensing skylights automatically open like clam shells to ventilate and provide natural sunlight to the coral reefs and rainforest within.

But the seven hillocks, which are said to echo the seven major hills of San Francisco, do more than simply express the curves and support the spaces of the interior, they give the museum a living experiment in native plant restoration amidst the alien greenery of Golden Gate Park.

Piano has suggested that the idea was to pick up a piece of the park and slide the museum under it, but it's much more than that. Since the plants were chosen to attract local butterflies, birds, and insects, some of which are endangered, the roof offers a quietly utopian statement.

Even as we grow and change it seems to whisper, "We can do better."


Perhaps even more crucial than its role as native landscaping, it introduces the turf roof to San Franciscans as an architectural choice. Living roofs have been around for centuries in Europe and some American pioneers incorporated them into early dwellings. And if you've ever gone for a walk across the greenery of Yerba Buena Gardens or Civic Center Plaza, you have experienced the joys of a green roof. But the Civic Center Plaza roof, like most of the city's large scale turf roofs, is used to hide a subterranean parking lot. That's great. But that's not exactly the same as choosing and designing a green roof for the tops of buildings.

I grew up under a turf roof in a home my father designed, and so the idea of grass growing over your head has never seemed new to me. But the early turf technology (like early solar panels) didn't always deliver on the dream. My mother's strategically placed buckets around the dining room and family room offered a humble testimony to that fact. Huddled under our dripping grassy roof, we sometimes felt the way bunnies must feel in their burrows, waiting for the rain to stop.

In the past decade however, green roofs have come of age. Although Gap Inc., brought large scale green roofs to the Bay Area in 1997 with its 69,000 square-foot green headquarters in San Bruno, the concept hasn't taken off here as quickly as in many other places. In Germany, it's already mainstream, with 7 percent of all new construction incorporating a green roof into the design. In England, large and small scale living roofs have spawned a movement of enthusiastic practitioners, researchers and designers, buoyed by government incentives. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley's love for green roofs led to the new roof energy code, which requires white (reflective) or green (vegetated) roofs, and has produced some 120 new green roofs in the city center (including its city hall).

Heck, even the Mormons have green roofs! Salt Lake City's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Conference Center features an eight-acre multi-level roof resembling mountain meadows, planted with 300 types of wildflowers.

In an era of carbon consciousness, it's only natural that green roofs should gain currency for a wide variety of reasons. By providing insulation, they lower energy bills. By absorbing rain water, they reduce storm runoff — one of the primary ways nitrate and phosphorous pollution get into our ground water is via roof runoff. (The Academy of Sciences is designed to reduce runoff by 70 percent.) Populated by plants, they clean the air, absorb urban noise and relax us with their natural beauty. In hot climates, they greatly reduce the heat island effect, in which cities amplify the heat of the sun and create hotter climates. Some research has shown that in hot cities like Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, green roofs could reduce inner city temperatures by 10 degrees.

So what's stopping the literal greening of San Francisco's skyline? One deterrent is price — though turf roofs are supposed to last twice as long as traditional roofs, they are more expensive — an estimated 300 percent more. But factoring in the building's lower energy costs and reduced storm runoff infrastructure lowers the price substantially. And as turf roofs grow more popular, the price has dropped substantially.

Not every structure is built to carry the extra load of a soil roof (which gets substantially heavier when wet), but light-weight soils and plants have made the turf roof surprisingly adaptable to older homes. Toyota's non-automotive division has come up with a "turf mat" of two-inch-thick lawn tiles that might work for roofs that can't carry a traditional turf roof.

According to Mark Palmer of San Francisco's Department of the Environment, the green roof is gaining in popularity. "We're seeing more and more residential applications for turf roofs in the building department," he said, adding that the Department of Building Inspection is currently working on a set of criteria for living roofs. Since projects that cross a certain environmental threshold now can get into the priority permit pool, both homeowners and developers are eager to design with green building in mind. A green roof is one way to get green brownie points.

If you're interested in building with a green roof or retrofitting an existing roof, where should you start? It's best to begin with an structural engineer who can calculate your home's strength. The next step might be to research kinds of turf systems that have been used on your sort of roof.

I can't imagine that the Academy won't inspire a local living-roof mania. And not a minute too soon. According to Palmer, the next 25 years of building have the potential to create a whole new world. "Eighty percent of our buildings will be new or renovated by 2035," he says. "So it's a tremendous opportunity to change our environment."

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...carollloyd.DTL

[mongoXZ]

Absolutely gorgeous! It's looking better than the renderings. Are visitors going to be able to go on the roof?

[BTinSF]

First tenants ready to put down roots at new Academy of Sciences
Exotic trees arrive from Florida to take place in rain forest dome

Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 11, 2007

The new California Academy of Sciences building got its first living full-time residents Monday, and they had no idea how important they were. But that's to be understood - they don't have brains.

They're four trees.

Not just any trees, though.

These are gigantic, exotic, extremely ecologically fragile plants - and truly foreign to California.

In fact, when the academy began casting about two years ago for Brazilian beautyleaf, black olive, mahogany and water chestnut trees to put in its rain forest exhibit, it could find none in this state. That's why the academy turned to Florida to get these four trees and have them trucked across the nation.

On Monday, the trees were installed in the freshly finished, four-story-high glass dome that will house the largest living rain forest display in the world when the museum opens to the public sometime next fall in Golden Gate Park.

Several other exotic trees were also in the truck that arrived from Florida over the weekend. But those - two peach palms and another water chestnut for the dome, plus three mangrove trees for the separate coral reef exhibit - won't be installed at the museum until today.

So Monday belonged to the first four. And witnessing the 25- to 30-foot natural towers being planted inside the giant glass dome was a nail-biting, awe-inspiring experience for those who had invested two years and a lot of passion in the tree project.

"Just look at the faces on all these guys," job supervisor Raul Artiga said while six of his workers gingerly jockeyed the black olive toward its planting spot. "It's like watching someone give your baby a bath. Nerve-racking."

The black olive at that moment hung suspended upright in the air by a strap attached to a hydraulic crane poking out over the dome's second-floor railing. At four tons, the 30-foot-high tree would easily crush anyone it fell on, so steering it was more than just a matter of making sure it was set down in its planting soil at the correct angle. It was life and death.

"Two feet to the right!" shouted one of the men. The crane's engine whirred overhead. The tree swung slowly, and all six workers shuffled fluidly with it. "Now front ... now turn ... now left ..." The commands came urgently and quickly.

After 20 minutes of swinging and shoving, the black olive hovered over the 4-foot-wide, 2 1/2-foot-deep pile of enriched soil that would become its home. One more sharp whine from the crane, a few adjustment pushes from the workmen, and two minutes later the tree was seated.

It was 10:37 a.m. The academy museum had its first resident.

It was a 1-foot-wide spear of gnarled trunk with spindly branches sporting teardrop-shaped leaves - but a living resident nonetheless. And it's one that is expected, within a couple of years, to soar to the top of the dome's 70-foot-high ceiling.

"To say this is a big day here is an understatement," said Rob Halpern, the New York horticulturist who designed and oversaw the tree project. "You can't find these trees anywhere in California, so if we make a mistake we have to go back to Florida."

The academy's new trees began their odyssey to San Francisco 18 months ago when they were chosen at the Southeast Growers compound in Miami. They were already mature trees by then, having been planted several years earlier, but once the academy team selected them, they underwent an exhaustive monitoring program to prepare them for the rain forest dome.

Each tree, from top to root ball, had to be cleaned and checked for harmful bugs, such as root-gobbling nematodes. Then they were placed in planters inside a "shade house" built specially to filter sunlight and protect the trees from outside elements. From there on out, they were checked regularly by California and Florida agricultural inspectors and Halpern to make sure they grew safe and healthy.

Last week, the trees were stacked in a climate-controlled semi-truck trailer, which kept the trees at a rain forest-like humid 80 degrees like the academy dome will, and transported to San Francisco.

While the truck idled outside on Monday, each tree's predetermined spot in the dome was prepared with nutrient-rich dirt. Then a forklift brought the trees in, one by one, through a 12-foot hole made in the dome by removing two glass panels. After they were planted, the trees' bases were surrounded by a special rock-and-powder mix that lets the roots spread freely without thrusting upward and breaking the dome's walkways.

"The first few months here will be very sensitive for the trees," said Chris Andrews, the academy's associate director. "They have to set down roots, establish themselves, recover from their trip.

"Growing a tropical forest in San Francisco is no small undertaking," he added with a grin.

Choosing, growing, transporting and installing the trees is costing about $300,000, academy officials said. Still to come for the rain forest exhibit are more than 600 birds and butterflies, 100 rare reptiles and amphibians, and hundreds of bushes and flowers.

When the work is complete and the museum opens, visitors will be able to see four types of rain forest life: fish and underwater plants on the first floor, Borneo bats and snakes on the second, Madagascar geckos and other creatures on the third and Costa Rican butterflies on the top floor.

"If you look around the United States, there is really no model for this dome," said Andrews. "The Dallas World Aquarium and the Cleveland Botanical Garden are truly wonderful, but none of them have these things that we have here all together.

"This is going to be magnificent."





E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../MN7GTRJOV.DTL

Video at source

[BTinSF]

New Academy of Sciences rounds off Music Concourse transformation
John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer
Saturday, December 15, 2007

As far back as the Gold Rush, San Francisco has flourished by reinventing itself. The 1906 earthquake, the construction of the bridges in the 1930s, the waves of social upheaval after World War II - all these things made the city stronger, gave it new character and life.

Now there's a fresh example, the transformation of the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park. The homes of two cherished cultural institutions - the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and the California Academy of Sciences - have been torn down and rebuilt. The classical landscape between them has been restored and enlarged.

Eighteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake drove home the need for a major investment in this civic treasure, all the pieces are in place. Visually, the result is nothing like what existed before. But this is fusion of the best sort: a showcase of art and science where innovative architecture nests comfortably in a familiar setting.

The Music Concourse district also demonstrates what San Francisco should be - a city open to new ideas even as it protects what's of value from our past.

The full effect won't be obvious until next fall when the academy returns to the site it occupied from 1916 until 2004. But the institution's new home stands ready along the south edge of the Concourse's landscaped oval, across from the de Young, which reopened in 2005.

And even though academy staff will spend most of 2008 installing exhibits and moving 900 species of flora and fauna into their new home, the presence of the academy-to-come shows how compelling this renewed district will be.

The new academy building replaces a haphazard collage of wings erected as the need arose. Instead, Italian architect Renzo Piano has designed a 4-acre rectangle that contains museum and research space behind 36-foot-high walls of concrete and glass. In the middle of the rectangle is a glassed-in central "piazza" flanked by 63-foot-high globes; one will contain a planetarium, the other a rain forest exhibit.

If the design was simply a big box with two humps, the result would be underwhelming. Piano's inspiration is to blur the academy into the greenery around it. He cloaks the roof with native plants and wildflowers, and drapes the roof over the planetarium and rain forest as though they were new ripples in the topography of western San Francisco.

Piano likens the undulations to hills and the roof to a flying carpet, a piece of the park's landscape now lifted into the air. Which sounds nice, but chalk those images up to wishful thinking: The "hills" are unnaturally round, with the one covering the rain forest riddled by 18 porthole-like skylights. The fringe of the "carpet" is a glass canopy that extends 30 feet beyond the academy walls and is embedded with a grid of solar panels.

But the story here isn't the strained simulation of nature. It's how Piano makes the academy into an eloquent what-if: What if buildings from now on are designed to work in harmony with nature, rather than take it for granted?

That's the payoff. The expressive roof shows environmental issues can take architectural forms. It's not enough to add recycled materials to the mix, though the academy does that as well. We need visual reminders that in an era clouded by climate change, business as usual isn't enough.

Many Bay Area residents will prefer the academy to the more overtly modern de Young. Where the de Young lines the concourse with a cliff-like march of copper panels below a twisting mesh-clad abstract tower, the academy restores the limestone walls of Africa Hall, though the dioramas inside are being rebuilt from scratch.

There's also a generous use of glass, such as the 69-foot-wide entryway in the center of the concourse facade.

But look at the counterpart to Africa Hall: The western wall of the facade is a 188-foot stretch of windowless concrete. As for the canopy, steel columns and eaves support the glass and its photovoltaic grid.

This isn't nostalgia. It's unapologetically here and now.

Appearances aside, the de Young and the academy echo each other in their approach to the challenge of inserting a large contemporary structure into a large historic park.

Each makes big moves, as befits the scale of the concourse. Each makes use of fresh materials and unexpected shapes. Each will look more interesting with age: The academy's roof will mature like a garden, while the de Young's copper is starting to be softened by the first hints of a green patina.

And each one complements what sits in the middle - the concourse itself.

Unlike the newcomers, the landscaped oval essentially is the same as before, a formal Beaux Arts scene that includes ornate fountains amid tightly pruned sycamores and elms. It culminates on the west end with the Spreckels Temple of Music from 1900, its regal stone band shell rising from the two-deep procession of columns on either side.

There are changes, though, and gracious ones. The new cultural buildings were accompanied by an underground garage, so park officials used the construction project to make the terrain more inviting. The bowl now is wrapped by a walkway with benches and colorful shrubs; the roadway circling the bowl was narrowed from two lanes to one, and 200 surface parking spaces were replaced by grass and plants.

The garage sparked opposition, including lawsuits that in 2004 brought construction to a halt. Critics ignored the overall benefits and focused on details such as alterations to the pedestrian tunnels leading into the bowl, or the supposed sacrilege of tucking a garage inside a park.

But now that everything is in place, the ensemble works great.

What we have is an interplay of styles, the composed confidence of one century and the searching experimentation of the next. We also get a sort of call-and-response through the ages. For instance, the classical bowl and its avant-garde neighbors share a common approach to the park. All have strong horizontal forms, broad strokes against the land.

Just as Golden Gate Park itself is a green stroke through the city's tight grid.

As emphatic as the horizontality of the concourse might be, each member of the trio also gestures toward the sky. The most obvious example is the de Young's abstract tower, torqued and straining as it rises. But the statuesque punch of the Spreckels band shell is almost as powerful. The academy's curves glide upward as well.

The academy is fenced off while exhibits are installed, and most of the surrounding landscape by SWA Group of Sausalito won't be planted until spring. As for the concourse, those benches and spaces won't fill until there's activity on both sides. Also, the restoration of the central fountains and the Spreckels band shell won't begin until next year.

Already, though, the re-imagined Music Concourse places San Francisco on the frontier of architecture and sustainable design. What's taking shape is remarkable - and it will only get better with time.





online resources

or the golden gate park concourse master plan, go to:

links.sfgate.com/ZBTT

or the california academy of sciences, go to:

www.calacademy.org/newacademy/

or the de young museum, go to:

www.thinker.org

E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../MNU7TP0DK.DTL

[BTinSF]

Friday, April 18, 2008
Natural evolution at California Academy of Sciences
Museum hires homo sapiens
San Francisco Business Times - by Sarah Duxbury

Opening day isn't until Sept. 27, but the penguins and fish aren't the only new arrivals at the California Academy of Sciences.

The museum and research institution is staffing up. Many of the new hires, starting with Executive Director Gregory Farrington, who resigned as president of Lehigh University just over a year ago, are top executives who will oversee operation of the new Academy once it opens.

The new hires include: David Mindell, dean of research and science collections, and Don Skeoch, chief revenue officer, both in newly created positions, as well as Blair Shane, chief marketing officer, and Ryan Wyatt, director of Morrison Planetarium and science visualization.

The Academy is also conducting a national search for its first dean of public education, a new position made possible by a $3 million endowment grant.

When the Academy moved to temporary digs on Howard Street, it downsized considerably from about 350 full-time positions to 200, which is one reason for its current hiring spree. Too, the new building is bigger, and the Academy's ambitions are grander, which will require more manpower, particularly in the bigger aquarium. The new museum will employ about 400.

"It's not as if we're in some undisciplined way hiring everyone in sight," Farrington said. "It's all part of a careful plan that's designed to run the new institution."

Indeed, most of these new hires were made after a national search. Wyatt previously worked at the Hayden Planetarium at New York City's American Museum of Natural History; Mindell was a professor at the University of Michigan and a curator in its museum of zoology, and Skeoch, whose job is to maximize the visitor experience and, with it, revenue, came from Universal Studios. Skeoch will build an entirely new department, and he's already made several hires.

The museum is dramatically increasing its volunteer base, too. It will rely on more than 500 volunteer docents to inform the public and lead tours, more than twice the number in the old Golden Gate Park museum.

Once settled in the new home, scientific research will be an even greater focus of the Academy, and so will be integrating it into the exhibits and making the public more generally aware of the scientific work the museum does.

The Academy has new leadership at the board level, too. Bill Patterson became the new board chair in June 2007.

"We have one crew who have imagined and then made real a whole new institution in terms of the physical, and then there's a natural transition point for the people ... who will focus on and invest in what goes into the building," Farrington said. "It's what I call the stage and the play. The stage is built. My focus is the play."

Farrington succeeds Patrick Kociolek, who has returned to pure research as the Academy's Hanna Chair in Diatom Studies.

One major undertaking has been to market the new Academy as one of the city's major tourist destinations. While half of all visitors to New York's Natural History Museum are tourists, only about 10 percent of visitors to the old Academy were tourists, Farrington said. "My chant here in the Academy is 'Beat Alcatraz'."

The entire project cost, which includes moving to a temporary home on Howard Street, building the Renzo Piano-designed museum complete with a host of super-green elements and moving back in, will cost $488 million. Of that, the Academy has raised $440 million. The attention that the capital campaign has drawn to the museum has also attracted close to $20 million for its endowment, which stands at $164 million.

While the museum is far from fully occupied, countless fish and other creatures already call it home. Diego the sea turtle moves in this week, and the alligator swamp will soon be flooded to welcome its toothy occupants.

Farrington expects to welcome between 1.5 million and 2 million visitors in the first year, double the traffic of the old facility. New museums often see attendance drop in their sophomore years, but Farrington hopes the efforts to make the Academy a must-stop on every tourist and conventioneer's itinerary will help avoid that slump.

sduxbury@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4963

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranci...ml?t=printable

[BTinSF]

ARCHITECTURE
OCTOBER 22, 2008
Piano's Forte: Museum as Ecosystem
By DAVID LITTLEJOHN
San Francisco



Renzo Piano has been the architect of preference for original and dramatic new museum projects ever since he and Richard Rogers shocked Paris with their radically modern Centre Pompidou in 1977. In tranquil contrast, Mr. Piano has designed two of the most elegant small private art museums I have ever seen -- the Menil Collection in Houston (1987) and the Beyeler Foundation north of Basel (1997). After designing a "native"-looking cultural center for New Caledonia in the south Pacific (1998), his Genoa-based workshop accepted several commissions to enlarge and improve existing museums across the U.S.

But now he has designed a new museum (if that is the word) as novel and exciting as anything since the Pompidou. Over the past eight years Mr. Piano, working with a small army of collaborators, replaced a complex of 11 buildings in Golden Gate Park with a single light-filled glass and concrete home for the California Academy of Sciences. Its $488 million cost (70% paid by private donations) included moving 38,000 living creatures and 20 million dead specimens elsewhere for 3½ years, then moving them all back.

The academy, founded in 1853, is primarily a research institution, sponsoring scientific expeditions around the world. But over the years it began to do more and more collecting and exhibiting, until it included a major aquarium and planetarium as well as extensive terrestrial displays. Now all are housed in a single building, for a unified experience and a common purpose.

Most of the contents visible to the public are alive: snakes slither, alligators and octopuses appear to sleep, birds and butterflies fly about a living rain forest. Tens of thousands of sea creatures make their home in undersea habitats that meander through the building. The undulating green roof is covered with 1.7 million native plants. You can climb up the rain forest on spiraling paths, walk under Amazon floodwaters through a transparent tunnel, take a glass elevator up to admire the dense flora that rolls over the seven hills of the roof. Much of the visitor's experience is that of actually being in distant, alien, exotic parts of our planet -- or (in the planetarium) of our universe. Rocks, fish and plants in the world's largest indoor coral reef can be seen from above as well as from under water. Broad, sometimes curving transparent walls hold back 500,000 gallons of sea water. Temperatures and humidity change, winds blow, waves ripple, skies darken, jungle birds screech.


Renzo Piano's structure for the California Academy of Sciences contains a real rain forest, which visitors can ascend on spiraling paths.

The new California Academy of Sciences was designed to demonstrate not only the origin and the unique richness and diversity of the planet we inhabit, but also the ways in which these are threatened by man. It is no accident that the two primary exhibition areas are devoted to tropical rain forests and coral reefs -- two major earthly environments now radically shrinking. Or that the two big areas of didactic displays focus on evolution and global warming. Many of the habitats and living creatures shown here are in danger of extinction. The ultimate thesis of "Fragile Planet," the spectacular opening planetarium show, is that Earth still seems to be the only planet capable of sustaining what we call life -- and that if we continue to threaten or reduce life on Earth, it may be the end of the story.


The 212,000-gallon Coral Reef display at the California Academy of Sciences.

The building is relatively easy to navigate. The three central bays compose an immense, glass-walled conservatory, separated into three glass-divided spaces (visitors' entrance, central atrium, employees' entrance). One can look clear through the building from north to south into the greenery of Golden Gate Park. Standing in the 96-by-72-foot atrium (which Mr. Piano calls a piazza), one can also look into the park to the east and west, down long symmetrical wings 35 feet high. Depending on the weather, this piazza can have a translucent, transparent, or wholly open ceiling, over an intricate double spiderweb of steel beam and cable trusses.

Each of the wings, east and west, houses a huge truncated sphere, 90 feet in diameter. The tops of these two partial spheres, bursting through the roof, form the two most prominent dome-shaped hills atop the building, each punctured with portholes for light and temperature control. The glass globe to the west encloses a four-level tropical rain forest: the Amazon in flood, a forest floor from Borneo, a higher tree level from Madagascar, and a Costa Rican canopy. Each level is full of living plants and creatures, as well as related displays. The enclosed hemisphere to the east houses the planetarium, sliced off at an angle under the seats to overhang the surface level of the great Philippine coral reef. Here one can cross over Indiana Jones footbridges inches above gliding sharks and rays.

Beyond the two spheres, lighted by the great east and west garden walls, are large open areas currently devoted to "Islands of Evolution: Madagasca r and the Galapagos" and "Climate Change in California." In the basement, five different undersea worlds are visible through acrylic panels.

The four concrete-walled corners of the building are devoted, respectively, to restaurants and a gift shop; the African Hall; offices and labs (on the south side), almost all with natural light; and the academy's vast research collections.

When the old museum was torn down, two of its neo-classical exterior walls were left standing. Today, they merge uncomfortably with the plain concrete and glass box built around them. Behind these walls was created an exact replica of the long, shallow-vaulted African Hall of 1934, with 21 old-fashioned (but still fascinating) exhibits of stuffed African animals in stage-set habitats. As if admitting that such displays are passé, the academy has introduced a few living creatures among the dead, and an endearing colony of live South African penguins -- now the academy's mascot -- at the far end of the hall. I was pleased to discover that they were able to find room for my favorite alligator pit (1923), with its railing of bronze seahorses. But there was no need to recreate the Doric colonnade behind it, which looks out of place.

My only other misgivings are narrowly architectural. The long gray-and-glass facade of the new science museum -- partly old, partly new -- is even less interesting to look at than the browning copper sheets that cover the façade of Herzog & DeMeuron's de Young Museum of 2005, which it faces across a formal promenade of pollarded plane trees. The academy's green roof has been written about a great deal, whether because of Mr. Piano's original conceit (a visual counterpart to the surrounding hills, a piece of the park pushed up by a building), its supposed symbolism (the seven hills of San Francisco), its contribution to the building's super-green status (natural insulation, rainwater absorption, wildlife attraction, etc.), or the extraordinary difficulty and ingenuity of its design and construction. But in no way does it fit visually with the austere, geometrical box underneath it. The only place you can see it all clearly is from the observation deck atop the de Young tower.

In the month since it opened, Mr. Piano's new home for the academy has become one of the most popular attractions in this tourist-mobbed little city. Take public transportation (and save $3 on the museum admission fee), avoid weekends, aim for the morning, and book early for planetarium seats and an environmentally correct gourmet lunch. The penguins are fed at 11 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Mr. Littlejohn writes about West Coast cultural events for the Journal.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1224...rsonal_journal

[brown2]

I went recently with my group and it was spectacular. I live across the bay and had no idea the whole project was so amazing. I'd heard about it for years but never thought much of it until we were required to go for a group project.