California Academy of Sciences Poised to Open New Green Quarters

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- The California Academy of Sciences is poised to publicly unveil its award-winning new facility next month — a move that its leaders hope will literally and figuratively open the doors to new green quarters.

Occupying all but an acre of the academy's former footprint in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the $488 million project to reconstruct and reinvent the facility has produced a showcase of green architecture and exhibits that strive to reflect a "sustainability message"  in every facet, the academy's leadership team says.

The 410,000-square-foot structure designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano features museum, research and work space on three levels that include multilevel exhibits within that framework. The building is crowned by a 2.5-acre living roof. The rolling landscape of colorful native plants and wildflowers sits 35 feet above the ground and mirrors the nearby slopes of San Francisco's Twin Peaks and Mount Davidson.

Beneath the roof, a single building houses the academy components that once stretched across 12 structures. The key elements are the new iterations of the Morrison Planetarium, Kimball Natural History Museum and Steinhart Aquarium. Also included are eight scientific research departments, an indoor rainforest and a coral reef exhibit with some 4,000 fish in a 212,000-gallon tank that the academy says is the deepest living display of its kind.

"Our goal is to create a new facility that will not only hold powerful exhibits but serve as one itself, inspiring visitors to conserve natural resources and help sustain the diversity of life on Earth," Academy Executive Director Gregory Farrington said in a statement earlier this year as the construction project neared completion.

While the new facility will provide learning journeys for its visitors, it is already providing paths for study and further research for the staff, said Frank Almeda, who as the academy's senior curator of botany has a leading role the living roof project.

"The sustainability message really can reverberate in many different ways," Almeda said, noting that the interactions of birds, other wildlife and the surrounding environment with the green roof make the acreage a living lab.   

"This roof is unique among living roofs," Almeda said during a preview of the facility this week.

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