Competing architects presented one elaborate design after another. When Piano arrived from Genoa, however, he brought only his daughter, the story goes, along with a sketchpad and a green felt-tip pen. "How can I know what to suggest when we have had no conversation?" asked Piano, whose prized work includes the Pompidou Center, the Whitney Museum expansion, and The New York Times building. No two of his structures are alike, his devotees say, because of his collaborative nature and attention to local conditions.
He got the job, and eight years later the riveting 410,000-square-foot design has recently opened to the public. An airy, glass-and-steel facade capped by a 2 1/2-acre living roof of native plants that is already attracting birds and butterflies, the new Academy stands just across the Music Concourse from the opaque-walled, equally riveting de Young art museum. (Each museum has a new two-level underground garage for visitor parking, preserving the open space around them.)
Replacing the Academy's former 12 buildings, the new facility houses a natural history museum, aquarium, and planetarium under one roof, along with laboratory facilities. While most research is sequestered on lower floors, one of the building's imaginative trappings is a glass-walled lab on the first floor through which visitors can watch researchers work. An exhibit "Science in Action" also focuses on research, with six flat-screen monitors providing up-to-date science news.
Piano wanted, as he put it, to "metaphorically lift up a piece of the park and put a building underneath." And, from within, a visitor indeed feels at one with the landscape. Standing midpoint in the building, in its dramatic glass piazza, you can look front or rear out at the park. Transparency, and not feeling trapped indoors, is what Piano was after.
