SAN FRANCISCO – Putting a major cultural institution into mothballs is not an easy thing to do. Repurposing it for the 21st century is an even bigger challenge.
After 10 years of fundraising, five years of construction and $488 million in expenditures, the verdict is in: San Francisco's new Academy of Sciences, which opened Saturday in Golden Gate Park, was well worth the wait.
Simply put, it's a landmark as captivating for its architectural statement as for the wondrous exhibits inside.
The old Academy, a beloved if slowly crumbling complex that had occupied the site since 1916, was damaged beyond repair in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and demolished in 2004. The reconceived institution that replaces it bears little resemblance to the traditional natural history museum of old.
Executive Director Greg Farrington instead calls it "a future-history museum."
"It's all about the nature of life and how we as humans are going to find a way to stay," he says of the Academy's mission.
Italian architect Renzo Piano was chosen to design a "green" building that would connect with the natural world on a visual as well as functional level. The result is light, airy, hugely imaginative and inviting at every level.
Designed around two orbs tied together by a central piazza, the largely transparent building is capped with an undulating "living roof" planted with California wildflowers. One of the interior spheres contains the Morrison Planetarium, a 300-seat theater showing state-of-the-art digital projections. The other is a transparent glass greenhouse holding a lush, four-story tropical rain forest that visitors explore via a spiraling walkway.
"It's as if nature threw a party and everybody came," Chris Andrews, chief of public projects for the Academy, says of the signature attraction.
More than half the museum's 100,000 square feet of public space is taken up by the reimagined Steinhart Aquarium, whose aquatic inhabitants were moved to temporary quarters on Howard Street when the old building was demolished. Highlights include a pedestrian tunnel through an exhibit of a flooded Amazon forest and a massive tank displaying live corals and aquatic creatures inhabiting reefs of the Philippines.
Except for a nod to the past extended in the classical architecture of the African Hall, little at the new Academy is reminiscent of the dark, segregated exhibits of old. Instead of static displays in glass cases, visitors encounter interactive displays, hands-on activities and video-game technology that makes it painless (for young people, at least) to learn about subjects such as climate change, deforestation, rising sea levels, aquatic biology and conservation of the natural world.
Sustainability is an overriding theme that will figure large in educational programs offered to school children, Academy members and, eventually, the public. The building itself is loaded with features intended to set a new standard for sustainable architecture in civic structures. Its "green" standouts include walls packed with shredded blue jeans for insulation, natural light and radiant heat that cut down on energy use, a glass canopy studded with 60,000 photovoltaic cells and, of course, the much-ballyhooed living roof, which both insulates the building and serves as a wildlife corridor.
The structure is expected to garner the highest level of certification awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Prospective visitors should expect healthy crowds during the Academy's first few months of operation. Museum staff members will monitor traffic flow and making necessary adjusts to keep things moving for the 2 million visitors expected the first year.
Traffic should move better than before on the outside, too: San Francisco's MUNI bus service has instituted a new route serving the Academy, the adjacent de Young Museum and other cultural institutions, while a new underground parking garage accommodates 800 cars.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: The new home for a cultural institution founded in 1853 and often described as the "Smithsonian of the West." The Academy encompasses the Steinhart Aquarium, the Kimball Natural History Museum and the Morrison Planetarium.WHERE: 55 Music Concourse Drive in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. On-site parking is available in an underground garage accessed from 10th Avenue off Fulton Street.
HOURS: 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday.
ADMISSION: $24.95 general, $19.95 ages 65 and older and 12-17, $14.95 ages 7-11, free for ages 6 and younger. Free admission for all is offered on "Wachovia Wednesdays," the third Wednesday of every month.
EATS: San Francisco-based chefs Loretta Keller and Charles Phan partnered on the Academy's two restaurants. The Academy Cafe, offering kid-friendly multicultural food, is the more casual venue. The Moss Room, named for the wall of living moss rising from an aquarium tank, features a California-Mediterranean menu that will change weekly.
INFORMATION: www.calacademy.org or (415) 379-8000.
– Janet Fullwood
