Callifornia Academy of Science

The day after Thanksgiving, 15 of our family members loaded into 3 vans/suvs and headed to San Francisco to enjoy the newly rebuilt California Academy of Science building. Located in Golden Gate Park, it has opened to capacity crowds. In fact, according to one of the docents, they are getting 30% more visitors than they had expected. As you can see, the roof design is most unusual, almost like something from Toontown. According to their web site the architect explains this design:

“I try to get at the fundamental emotion of a site,” says the architect. The roof design “is like lifting up a piece of the park and putting a building under it.”

"This museum has always worked on three levels - displaying the collection, educating the public, researching the science. The spirit of this new building is to announce and enforce this complexity of function."

The thing that struck me was the scarcity of interactive displays. They did have some but most of the exhibits were zoo-like such as the delightful penguin exhibit where the animals were very alive and fun to watch or the African landscape exhibit which included stuffed animals or simply paintings.


For those lucky enough to get close there were demonstrations and mini-lectures about the animals or the habitat. But because of the crowds we didn't see many. We did manage to get passes to one of the later planetarium shows. The planetarium is built more like an IMAX theater and uses the latest digital imagery making it very versatile.


By the time our group got around to visiting the 4 story rain forest habitat, I couldn't walk so I just sat and watched. One of the other visitors voiced a common complaint about that exhibit, "Wherever you stand in the rain forest habitat, you can see all the other visitors including those above and below you. I would like it to be arranged so that you see the rain forest without all the human sightseers."

This visitor (Barbara from San Francisco) gave us several good hints such as eating at the nearby De Young art museum where the crowds are smaller and the menu is large. She also suggested we come back in 6 months by which time the novelty will have worn off.