Renzo Piano calls his new building for the California Academy of Sciences a “soft machine.” “It sounds better in Italian, because machine brings to mind the process of making and Leonardo in his workshop,” he explains, pronouncing the Italian word macchina. The architect and his team at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) conceived of the 410,000-square-foot project as a manifestation of the academy’s mission to study, store, and exhibit the wonders of natural science. “It’s a machine for preserving nature,” says Piano. Great idea. But this is a big machine, at a key location in Golden Gate Park, and it needs to engage a lot of different people: the 10-year-old kid looking for the live penguins, the 40-year-old ichthyologist working there, and the romantic couple sitting on a bench in the adjacent plaza, called the Music Concourse.
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