It’s only natural that a Natural History museum is as eco-friendly as possible.
And, it’s only natural that “the world’s largest eco-friendly public building” will be a Natural History museum located in America’s most eco-friendly city.
Sometime next year, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park will throw open its front doors and invite the public into “one of the most expensive museum projects in a century,” according to Wired Magazine.
The $484 million building is incorporating a slew of green technologies to really put its money where its mouth is. How ironic it would be otherwise to celebrate the natural world while polluting it at the same time with an energy-consuming hog of a building.
With this in mind, the architects have implemented such innovations as a lawn roof that doubles as a natural habitat, 60,000 photovoltaic cells atop another roof, and shredded blue jeans as wall insulation (hey, isn’t Levi’s corporate headquarters located in San Francisco?).
When it is completed, the California Academy of Sciences is going to be one of the most impressive buildings around; what other piece of architecture so thoroughly practices what it preaches?