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At the New California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, you can see all the colorful creatures you’d expect to find inside a top-notch aquarium or museum, but it’s the outside of the building that truly makes it unique.
It's as if we've lifted up the park, built the museum underneath, and then we've dropped the park back down with this wonderful turnup acre-laying roof.
The roof collects rain runoff and filters it to the massive rainforest below. Indoor plants also receive sunlight from dozens of skylights. All of the 1.7 million native plants on the roof are planted in these bio-trays. These are made of coconut plus fiber. That’s biodegradable, and within 3 to 5 years this will become part of the soil. The roof’s solar panels will provide about 10% of the Academy’s energy needs while the heavy layers of soil and vegetation help keep the building cool.
Recycled ground-up blue jeans are used inside the museum walls. It turns out denim makes for great insulation.
The Academy also features an extensive exhibit on global warming. Museum officials are calling it the greenest museum of its size in the world. But they hope that title doesn’t last long.
Others are gonna come here look what we’ve done and then take it to the next level, so if we can be, if we can promote that and encourage others to do more than us, we’ll be very happy.
Inspiring other museums to think outside the box or in this case outside the building.
Haven Daley, the Associated Press, San francisco