Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences

Image: Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Renzo Piano, who could very well be my favorite architect (I'm very anxious to see the Morgan Library Extension in NY), has just opened (and going on with the same theme as my previous post on the Acropolis Museum by Bernard Tschumi) the building to the curators of the exhibit of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It has been newly renamed the Kimball Natural History Museum, and is scheduled to open in October of 2008, so we can't visit it right now. Although, you can get a pretty good view of the whole building from the free access viewing platform in the tower of the Herzog and de Meuron De young Museum.



The Academy of Sciences commissioned Piano to redo their outdated group of buildings into a "modern facility for exhibition, education, conservation, and research under one roof", which he literally did. Piano demolished most of the 11 buildings on the site, two of them are most prominent in the new design that places a "living roof" of native plants on seven rolling hills of varying sizes that represent the hills of San Francisco, this one roof manges to unify the entire building program while serving as an umbrella for the old buildings and becoming an exhibit in itself. In the center of this roof lies a glass canopy covering a Piazza, while the two larger "hills" are the two more important exhibits. The first one is a large domed simulated tropical ecosystem housing forest and wildlife from Borneo, Costa Rica, Madagascar and the Amazon rainforest's flooded river beds. The second one is the largest planetarium in the country.

The rolling "living roof" cantilevers over the perimeter of the buildings in order to produce shade to the glass facade and to place around 55,000 photo-voltaic cells.

If you want to know a little bit more, you can go to the article that the San Francisco Chronicle printed where they describe a guided walk through the museum's unfinished installations. The article is accompanied by updated photos and a video that's a definite must see, and the website of the California Academy of Science has an entire section dedicated to the new building, with photos, videos, and a time lapsed slideshow of the construction process.


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Sources:
Renzo Piano Building Workshop
San Francisco Chronicle
California Academy of Science