Charged with adding expansive and flexible exhibition space to the museum's campus, the Renzo Piano team—who were responsible for the neighboring Broad Contemporary Art Museum, completed in 2008—designed an open-plan pavilion large enough to accommodate large-scale works or several separate exhibitions simultaneously.

Here we go again—another art museum, another building by Renzo Piano.

Renzo Piano calls his new building for the California Academy of Sciences a “soft machine.”

To support the expansive roof, RPBW designed a set of four masonry structures—one at each corner—incorporating two of the original academy’s Neoclassical limestone walls in the northeast structure and using poured concrete for the others.

In the past few years, New York City has been valiantly trying to turn around its deserved reputation for treating innovative architecture like an exotic disease that should be stamped out by courageous developers, bankers, and government officials.