Who is the architect that designed the California Academy of Sciences building in San Francisco?
By any measure, Renzo Piano stands among the world’s greatest architects. As the jury awarding him the 1998 Pritzker Prize wrote, “Piano achieves a rare melding of art, architecture, and engineering in a truly remarkable synthesis. He celebrates structure in a perfect union of technology and art.” “I try to get at the fundamental emotion of a site,” says the architect. The roof design “is like lifting up a piece of the park and putting a building under it.” “This museum has always worked on three levels – displaying the collection, educating the public, researching the science. The spirit of this new building is to announce and enforce this complexity of function.” Sources: http://www.calacademy.
The city and county of San Francisco now has over 120 architects, engineers and construction managers who have upgraded their knowledge and skills to become LEED Accredited Professionals. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a program of the US Green Building Council that recognizes the environmental performance of buildings and building professionals. With this cadre of accredited professionals, San Francisco has over 40 LEED registered municipal projects in the pipeline and more on the way. Our new LEED certified staff will help us build and maintain a new greener San Francisco: * San Francisco’s Department of Public Works leads the way with 59 design professionals now LEED accredited. DPW projects include 10 libraries, two hospitals, several office buildings and two museums including the LEED Platinum California Academy of Sciences — the largest and most-visited LEED Platinum building in the world. * San Francisco’s Planning Department has 21 LEE
Renzo Piano’s original concept for the new California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park was elegantly simple: Slice out a huge, rectangular section of the park landscape, lift it 36 feet into the air and slide a new piece of architecture underneath. The floor of the park would become a green roof atop the facility — a feature Piano dubbed “the flying carpet.” The completed academy is neither perfectly elegant nor perfectly simple. The building’s marriage of well-behaved classical proportion and shape-shifting organic form is sometimes strained. Its precise, transparent facade sits rather uncomfortably atop a long fragment of the academy’s old neoclassical building, the rest of which was demolished four years ago after suffering damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Sources: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-et-academy27-2008sep27,0,3779263.
