A Garden in the Sky

Work crews are about to start planting the roof of the new California Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park -- an architectural capstone that also qualifies as one of the world's most ambitious biodiversity experiments.

Roof gardens are as ancient as Babylon and a deeply rooted fad in Europe, but the vegetated structure taking shape in the park is perhaps the grandest foray yet into what museum visionaries like to call "integrated regenerative architecture."

Gregory Farrington, the new executive director of the California Academy, views the roof as a unique scientific showplace designed to flip the conventional museum concept on its head.

"Most museums have thick walls that separate the inside from the outside and put in the basement or on the roof all the systems that you need to make the place functional. Here, the idea will be to make the building itself into an exhibit, and there is no separation of the inside from the outside," he said.

Visitors to the $300 million science center who make their way up to a rooftop viewing platform after the museum opens next year will see none of the hulking ventilation towers and emergency generators that cap most big buildings.

Those things and other utility systems have been buried underground to make way for 197,000 square feet of native strawberries, stonecrop and California poppies.

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