Visiting the California Academy of Sciences was like going to an undiscovered tropical jungle in a private patio next door. Not only had I had spent several months of gleeful obliviousness to its understated existence in the Golden Gate park right next door to my abode, I had relegated the rectangular block of grey concrete in my mind to a less glamorous cousin of the more prevailing de Young Museum located directly opposite it. I felt it looked like it would host a dry natural history equivalent of the interiors and proceeds of a City Hall or a United Nations jerry-build, only with an even more dull manuscript's taste. I went for regular runs in the park for months, paying more heed and silent mental visits to the Japanese Tea garden and the botanical gardens, amidst the montage of foliage, chirping birds, scrawny lakes, tennis courts, a northern windmill and cascading waterfalls embellished with pudgy green ducks at their base.
On the day of the visit, the museum teemed with extraordinary biodiversity, but without the discomfort of spiders or stray rattlesnakes, and though obviously organized and mundane as a zoological park might feel, it gave you no excuse to dismiss it as remotely anything but real. On the upside, your attention could be fully applied to enjoying the assortment of a rain-forest as showy of its stuff as the Amazon, but you didn't have to divert your energies to the heightened sense of self-preservation you tend to build in primeval wilderness. A four-story rainforest was bathed in acrid humidity and sounded of dripping water off the tips of giant leaves, and of frogs croaking to the beat of the jungle. Macaws and other new world parrots were presented with equal emphasis as leafcutter ants, while carnivorous plants stood pretty and bulbed, inconspicuous to their prey. Strings of slimy toads and camouflaged lizards stood still like rocks and made me want to flit to the next exhibit fast enough, lest they emerge suddenly out of their seeming lifelessness into the reality of movement, which I wished to escape witnessing. Exotic ants, butterflies, geckos, lemurs, toads and plants from Madagascar, Borneo and Costa Rica were housed in their represented habitats.
Beneath glassed floor, lazy catfish and sting rays sailed obnoxiously against a wild rush of piranhas which formed bulky swarms of flock fish. At first sight, on the level of the museum entrance the marine life-filled aquarium showcased on the floor barely touched the surface, literally, of the oceanic world underneath. Stepping a level below in the tour paved way to a world of feroe naturoe unleashed - deep sea coral, ghostsharks (with sexual appendages on foreheads), sea urchins, upside-down jelly fish and colorful nudibranches - to handpick a few. Albino aligators, mammoth out-sized sharks swam smugly with small fish, perhaps complacent from the assurance of food, like one is when the kitchen refrigerator at home is loaded. A giant slimy green anaconda almost 18 feet long could be vicariously touched through slipping your arm into a mechanized compression duct which let you feel what its like when the beast wraps itself around a human. Not that I caved into the temptation of doing so.
Before embarking on the jungle or aquarium, I watched a show at the academy's planetarium featuring a Journey to the Stars - expounding on the life cycle of stars, familiar stellar formations and new celestial mysteries. Physics based simulations and stunning images from telescopes in space and the ground were rendered commercial television flavor with the unmistakable voice of Whoopi Goldberg explaining the birth and death of stars and discovering the fascinating, unfolding story that "connects us all to the stars". These larger-than-life, lets-talk-about-how-the-universe-began stories were a sure shot formula to make me feel like I didn't exist or if I did, I didn't matter, but I let myself revel in the comic-relief of not falling into the trap of an immersive theatrical projection the way I had been by Shenzi the Hyena in Lion King.
The academy's main feature was an undulating living roof, planted with native ground covers and local wildflowers, blurring the boundaries between building and parkland, culture and nature. It hosted miniature versions of San Francisco's landscape with green hillocks of 1.7 million plants growing in 50,000 biodegradable coconut husk and tree sap trays. The garden was structured around a network of rock in mesh cages, which allowed drainage and offered support to the husk trays.[1] The roof design had multiple functions. It provided 2.5 acres of native vegetation designed as a habitat for indigenous species, including the threatened Bay checkerspot butterfly.[2] Regular black tar and asphalt rooftops which lead to an effect called the "Urban Heat Island", typically cause cities to be 10 degrees warmer than outlying greener belts, due to an endless array of heat trapping pavements and roofs. Not surprisingly, a sixth of all energy in the U.S goes towards cooling buildings. According to the Academy's fact sheet on the building, the building consumed 30-35% less energy than required by code. The steep inclines of the little hills drew cool air into the central courtyard. Heat-sensing skylights automatically opened like clam shells to ventilate and provide natural sunlight to the coral reefs and rainforest within.[1]
The academy cafe had a wide variety of multi-cultural cuisine, made fresh, with healthy, sustainable and organic ingredients, and was surprisingly good for museum food. I picked up a steamed bun, hummus and roasted red pepper with olive tapenade on ciabatta, and a plate of Vietnamese summer rolls, followed by a classic chocolate pots de creme for dessert. As I later found out,by taking a stairwell downstairs, the academy also housed high-end fine dining in The Moss Room, featuring a dramatic namesake moss living wall sparkling and shimmering with light and water. The faint scent of ferns and shrubbery emanating from the forest-like wall mingled with the quiet water cascades dripping ostentatiously around the corner. All blended into quiet contrast with sleek Olle Lundberg inspired interiors, promising to be engulfed in the aroma of its eclectic California-Mediterranean cuisine. It is said of the museum and its food that "From an architectural standpoint, the sustainable and green nature of the building has created national interest, but in the food world it's the partnership of longtime friends Charles Phan and Loretta Keller that has created the frenzy"[3]. When the San Francisco's star chef duo need strawberries for a recipe, they don't go out to the farmers market, instead they go up to the museum's roof.
One critic praised the building as a "blazingly uncynical embrace of the Enlightenment values of truth and reason" and a "comforting reminder of the civilizing function of great art in a barbaric age."[4] My entire day had been spent in the building, yet I had barely been able to cover a fifth of what it had to offer. It was one thing to see the world's most diverse ecosystems thriving within the space of a few acres of land, but quite another to try to place yourself in the picture, since you essentially stood on the outside, looking in. If I went in my mind from the environ of the tiny dotted tadpole or an Amazon angelfish, casted unawares into a life of artificial wilderness, just as we are, perhaps - into cities, homes, countries, jobs, bank-accounts, immigrant experiences and scuba-diving adventures - a strikingly common thread on the continuity of life, sunrise, sunset, motion and fodder emerged with ennui-filled familiarity. That, facilitated by the higher order of the universe - the rotation of the earth, and the birth and death of stars, comets, planets and galaxies - means beyond our realm or control, defying our limited knowledge of the universe - made wonderfully within palpable reach in a planetarium enclosure - let everything fall disproportionately into place and perspective. I found myself returning home a block away, reversing a John Muir anecdote in my mind - that I only went in for a walk and finally concluded to stay till sundown, for going in, I found, I was really going out.
The grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never dried all at once:
a shower is forever falling
Vapor is ever rising
Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming,
on sea and continents and islands,
each in turn,
as the round earth rolls.