The spiderweb shaped Living Roof on top of California Academy of Sciences in bloom.

This fall, after eight years and almost half a billion dollars, architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built—the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park—housing its aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof.”

Long section of the museum design © Rpbw

Piano’s museum has made extensive use of technology in the service of the institution’s green mandate and promises to set a new standard for ‘green museums’. Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer writes about its genesis.

Overview © Rpbw

The Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing will include museum gardens and plantings that will increase green space on the city block by 21,075 square feet.

Forget Corinthian columns: Today’s museums have features like green roofs – such as on the new wing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Chicago – or goats as part of the maintenance team, as at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the first facility in the US to qualify for LEED certification on an existing building.

“I cannot count the number of institutions that are doing serious green stuff. That’s how huge it is,” says Sarah Brophy, coauthor of “The Green Museum,” to be published later this spring. “[Green measures] are going to become as natural and automatic as full accessibility and inclusivity,” Brophy says. “Within a year, the public is going to be asking all museums about their environmentally sustainable behavior. They’re going to want to see evidence. That will push all museums. There’s a pretty substantial learning curve, but the entire population is going to be going through it, and museums will be part of that group.”

Read article (the Christian Science Monitor. April 9, 2008)
Read about museums that are ‘going green’
Read an extensive case study of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, dubbed “The Temple of Green” (GreenSource).

Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat has won an international competition for the new entrance and extension of the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands. The new wing of the museum comprises approximately 2.000 m2 and will be completed in 2011. The most important aspect of Erick van Egeraat’s design is the consistent integration of the museum into the fabric of the city. A balanced play of building, landscape and water, creates a new identity for the extended museum. The staggered, organic roof of the new wing connects existing gardens and parks in the city. Erick van Egeraat is thus creating a publicly accessible park. Openings in the roof allow light to penetrate into the exhibition spaces below. The new wing links the new entrance with existing parts of the museum and the city landscape.

Subterranean museum extension with rooftop-park

An existing coach-house will serve as the museum’s new main entrance. Lifted 1 meter above the ground, the existing structure rests on a glass plinth, revealing the building’s new function in an elegant manner. The historic façade is left untouched, therefore preserving the buildings civic appearance. During the day, the glass plinth allows light to enter the building. At night, interior lighting transforms the coach-house into a beacon for the city and its inhabitants. The design reinforces both the scenic character and the cultural-historic face of Assen’s city centre.

Go to website Drents Museum
Go to website Erik van Egeraat and associates

New museum entrance in elevated coach-house

Grass-covered roof at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Photo: Michiel van Iersel

The vertical garden on the wall of Caixa Forum in Madrid. Photo: Michiel van Iersel

It seems to be a trend among museums to use the construction of a new building to bring culture and nature closer together. Green buildings are cropping up all around the world. In June 2004, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid opened a five-story, 258,300-square-foot addition, with a grass-covered roof. Later this year Herzog & De Meuron’s cultural centre named Caixa Forum will open in another part of the Spanish capital, which includes a vertical Garden or “living wall” that was designed by the botanist Patrick Blanc.

Last year the French government opened the ethnographic Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, which is set in a luscious park (consisting of 15000 plants of 150 species from all continents) along the banks of the river Seine and also has a green facade (”le mur vegetal”) that protects it from the burning sun and the pollution from passing cars. At the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada a 500-square-foot vegetated wall holds plant materials, which are similar to those found on cliff faces, including wild flowers, mosses, and berries. And earlier this month Patrick Blanc completed yet another vertical garden, this time at the natural history museum (Le Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle) in Toulousse, which will reopen in December 2007.

P.S.: Last January the Art Newspaper already explained why it pays for museums to go green.

Luscious garden with 15000 plants at Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. Photo: Michiel van Iersel

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The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reports on the idea of Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi to convert the golden dome that crowns the Vienna’s Secession into a five-star hotel room. The museum has already started constructing this temporary guestroom, and expects to welcome its first guest later this summer. The project “HIER ENTSTEHT EIN HOTEL” is part of the Secession’s summer outdoor program, which also includes an ‘Art mosque’ (Kunstmoschee by Azra AkÅ¡amija) and a sausage stand (Die Wursthaberer by Patrick Baumüller and Severin Hofmann). The combination of meat and Islam will definitely help visitors who have booked the hotel room to get a good night’s sleep.

Read article in Der Standard (In German, July 19, 2007))
Go to website Secession

Wired Magazine of August brings a story about the ambition of the California Academy of Sciences to be the greenest museum on earth:

Nestled into the fog and forest of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences aims to be the world’s largest eco-friendly public building when it reopens in 2008. (It’s bucking for a platinum LEED green-building certification.) Architect Renzo Piano used a textbook’s worth of enviro-engineering tricks for the seven-year effort, an almost total teardown and rebuild. At $484 million, it’s one of the most expensive museum projects in a century. But if it all works as planned, the city will boast a natural history museum that enhances nature instead of just stockpiling it.

Read further on Wired.com
Building The New Academy