The Coral Reef’s formwork had to be precisely fitted
to the watertight windows.
ENVIRONMENT
AQUARIUM
DEEP-SEA
VIEWING
The Academy might be best known for its roof, but the
lion’s share of the exhibition space is given over to Steinhart Aquarium, which includes a flooded Amazon rain
forest, a display of native sea life, a swamp teeming with
alligators, a habitat for African penguins, and a 12,000-
square-foot Philippine coral reef. The initial challenge for
the New York–based exhibition designers, Thinc Design,
was integrating the aquarium into the rest of the building.
“Renzo was really into having clear sight lines,” says
Thinc’s Tom Hennes, but “an aquarium thrives on complexity, obstructing views, and discovering things around corners.” As a result, the upper levels remain crisp and uncluttered, but on the lower levels, he says, “the architecture
goes away and explorability comes to the foreground.”
Creating the tanks’ large viewing windows was another
test. The enormous curved-acrylic panels were designed
to engage peripheral vision and create a feeling of immersion. Several had to be tested by a lens company to ensure
their compatibility with the human eye. The main panel
for the coral-reef tank, built to withstand 340,000 pounds
of water pressure, was so large that Reynolds Polymer
Technology needed a temporary 60-foot-long oven in its
parking lot to fabricate it. In the end, though, the space is
designed to pay off emotionally. “It’s not just, ‘I love fish,
let’s go home,’” Hennes says. “It’s more, ‘I love fish and
feel motivated to do something about the world.’”
Sidebar: top left, courtesy Arup; top right, courtesy the California Academy of Sciences; center,
Tim Griffith; bottom left, courtesy Arup; bottom right, courtesy Renzo Piano Building Workshop
BY DANIELA MORELL
The large acrylic viewing panel
of the aquarium tank began as a
liquid. The material was baked in
four separate molds, then glued
together before being baked again.
Arup designed the lights to be more diffuse and
farther away, allowing for much higher particle
content in the water. “That saves a lot of energy on
recirculating water because it doesn’t have to be
kept gin clear,” Rogers says. “And it’s so much
healthier for the fish—that’s what it’s all about.”
But elsewhere the profusion of artificial environments required elements—banks of metal-halide
lamps cooking the coral reef, for example—that in
a green building are like Texas oilmen crashing a
Sierra Club meeting. Which is why it’s all the more
impressive that the Academy stands to achieve a
LEED Platinum rating. There is a litany of reasons
why. All of the structural steel used in the museum is recycled; parts of the old building became a
freeway in the East Bay. Sand excavated during
construction restored nearby dunes. Fourteen
miles of polyethylene piping run under the floors,
giving the museum another means to regulate
its environment and reducing continued on page 165
Arup’s Alistair Guthrie sketched out
a plan to turn the roof’s steep slopes
into an innovative natural-ventilation
system for the Academy.
