Natural Phenomenon: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com - Annotated

Via Archinect.com.

• This fall, after eight years and almost half a billion dollars, world-famous architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built—the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park—housing its aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof.”

• by Matt Tyrnauer May 2008

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• The Kimball Natural History Museum’s “living roof” with Jules Verne porthole skylights. Photographs by Todd Eberle.

• “Talk about Moses coming down from the mountain,” says Greg Farrington, the academy’s director. “He just nailed it. It was inspiration. His vision was to lift up a piece of the park and slide the museum underneath.”

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• The rain forest inside the new academy building is enclosed in a glass dome.

• Few, if any, buildings of this stature come close to making their sustainability programs comprehensible as well as visually inspiring components of their design.

• “The building,” says Piano, “had to be green and sustainable to go with its purpose—study of the earth and science. It is also in a very unusual place, the middle of one of the most beautiful parks in the world. You almost never get a chance to build something in the middle of a great park, so it needed to be transparent. You needed to see where you are.