Being on the top of a science building, this new roof will attract a lot of attention.
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.
