California Academy of Sciences-Architecture

One of the world’s most innovative museum building programs—a record-setting, sustainable new home for the California Academy of Sciences—is opening to the public on September 27, 2008 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Expected to be the first museum to earn a LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, the new Academy will be topped with a 2.5-acre living roof and will employ a wide range of energy-saving materials and technologies. Designed by Pritzker Prize winner Renzo Piano, the new building will stand as an embodiment of the Academy’s mission to explore, explain and protect the natural world. Construction of the new facility, which began in September of 2005, is now nearly complete, and the exhibit build-out process has begun. The Academy’s staff, animals, and research collections have also embarked on their “Great Migration” back to Golden Gate Park. The most monumental move ever undertaken by a museum, the migration will include 38,000 live animals and over 20 million research specimens. Over the next eight months, everything from a colony of African penguins and a 70+ year-old Australian lungfish to 700,000 delicately pinned butterflies and an 80+ foot-long blue whale skeleton will be carefully shuttled across San Francisco into the new building.
http://www.calacademy.org/ (415) 321-8000.