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"  Unlike others competing to design the new California Academy of Sciences museum in San Francisco, the great Italian architect Renzo Piano arrived without a prepared submission. All he had was his sketchpad. He asked if he could go up to the roof of the old museum building. After an hour, he descended with a simple line drawing. It showed the outline of a museum whose undulating roofline followed the folds and rolls of the Golden Gate Park site and the hills beyond, and it proved to be the winning design. Opening next October, Piano&amp;#039;s Academy of Sciences aspires to earn the mark of the ultimate green museum: LEED platinum, the highest rating of the U.S. Green Building Council (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). According to the Washington-based organization&amp;#039;s playbook, points are given for each of dozens of green initiatives. Some are modest, like using paints free of VOCs (volatile organic compounds), or providing bike racks and showers so people can pedal rather than drive to work. Others are ambitious, like digging geothermal wells for heating and cooling or installing a planted roof that captures rainwater (nearly two million gallons annually will be absorbed into the Academy&amp;#039;s green roof, instead of gushing into storm sewers). Points are also gained for sourcing building materials from within a 500-mile radius and for recycling construction debris. The more points, the higher the rating. The minimum level is simply called LEED certified, ascending through silver and gold to the rarely achieved platinum level. Striving for LEED status would seem to be a no-brainer for new or expanding museums. But a museum is not like an office building, theater or other public space. Its priority is the preservation of its collections, which requires stringent control of temperature, humidity and natural light, even when the museum is closed. As a result, energy efficiency (a LEED core value) may have to go by the wayside. That&amp;#039;s why several major museum construction projects have not sought LEED certification. They include the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston. Moshe Safdie&amp;#039;s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now being built in Bentonville, Arkansas, has no higher hope than reaching the lowest rung of LEED&amp;#039;s ladder. &amp;quot;LEED is a great standardized system, but some things are specific to a museum,&amp;quot; says Matthew Siegel, head of collections at Boston&amp;#039;s MFA. &amp;quot;In the case of fresh air, we have to do the opposite of what LEED is suggesting in order to conserve our art.&amp;quot; And then there&amp;#039;s the issue of lighting. LEED favors maximizing natural light, but conservators don&amp;#039;t. Raw sunlight&amp;#039;s ultraviolet rays can injure art, especially works on paper or canvas. And art isn&amp;#039;t all it can damage. Even the fragile dazzle of a butterfly&amp;#039;s wing in a nature exhibit needs tender conditions of light D and humidity. Despite conflicting priorities, it is possible to create a certified green museum, as demonstrated by Michigan&amp;#039;s just-opened Grand Rapids Art Museum, which expects to be rated LEED gold. Advanced mechanical systems, including an &amp;quot;energy wheel&amp;quot; that blends old and new filtered air, help to reduce energy costs. But the most striking advance is actually a throwback to much older museums: oversized skylights that crown the galleries. Banished decades ago, the skylights, here called sky lanterns, are back with triple-layered glass that blocks the UV spectrum, while internal louvers deflect direct sunlight. A fabric scrim layer further diffuses the light. &amp;quot;Skylights for museums are different from home versions,&amp;quot; says the museum&amp;#039;s architect, Thai-born Kulapat Yantrasast. &amp;quot;In a house you just want light to come in and you accept shadows. But not in a gallery. Also, it&amp;#039;s okay at home for sunlight tones on the north and south walls to differ, but in a museum you want light to be neutral and consistent.&amp;quot;   The privately funded Grand Rapids museum had the flexibility to build as it wished. It&amp;#039;s far harder to create a publicly funded green building in bureaucratic New York City, let alone one that&amp;#039;s eligible to be certified LEED platinum. But that&amp;#039;s what has been achieved with the jaunty new visitor and administration center at the Queens Botanical Garden, which could be thought of as the indoor part of an outdoor nature museum. &amp;quot;If you aspire to a certified, or silver, rating, you can for the most part do it without increasing your budget,&amp;quot; lead architect Joan Krevlin of BKSK Architects says. &amp;quot;But going for gold and especially platinum can push up the cost quite a bit.&amp;quot; In a poll of visitors to the botanical garden, most wanted the new building to have what Krevlin calls &amp;quot;water features.&amp;quot; Her ingenious response is a design that merges ornamental water usage with water recycling. Rainwater from hard roof surfaces cascades from a corner of the cantilevered terrace roof into a pool called a Cleansing Biotope, where it&amp;#039;s filtered by water-loving plants. It&amp;#039;s then channeled to a stream that meanders through the grounds. Sink and shower water from the building, called gray water, is purified in a constructed wetland composed of more plants, whose roots do the deep cleaning, then returned to the building for toilet flushing. The facility will use 82 percent less water than a typical building its size. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s our water management system that stepped us up from gold to platinum,&amp;quot; Krevlin says. As befits a botanical garden, extra care went into choosing woods for the new building. A durable subtropical hardwood called ipe (pronounced EE-pay) was originally specified for the nine-foot-long brise-soleil (sun breakers) over the building&amp;#039;s long, narrow windows. Ipe had the approval of the Forest Stewardship Council, the guardian of sustainable wood harvesting, but Krevlin&amp;#039;s client had more stringent priorities. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want to ship wood from South America, just to most likely have to send it out west to be milled and then back east to the building site,&amp;quot; says Jennifer Ward Souder, director of capital projects and assistant director of the garden. &amp;quot;So I explored local sources.&amp;quot; The wood she chose to replace ipe is black locust, not commonly used by architects, yet plentiful and durable. The ultimate green museum roof, undulating over an expanse of 2 1/2 acres, is now being completed atop the California Academy of Sciences. It&amp;#039;s blanketed with 1.7 million native plants, making it the largest swath of purely native plants in San Francisco. And the green roof doubles as an integral part of the Golden Gate Park landscape, as Gordon Chong of Chong Partners Architecture, Piano&amp;#039;s collaborator on the project, explains: &amp;quot;You can imagine Renzo taking a knife and cutting around the ground plane of the site and raising it up 38 feet in the air [the roof height] and then sliding the museum under it.&amp;quot;   Photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto  Still, Piano can&amp;#039;t be called gung-ho green. When the museum asked him to substitute solar panels for the trellis he&amp;#039;d designed to overhang the roof, he resisted. But once convinced of the efficiencies of new multicrystalline photovoltaic cells embedded in the glass, he agreed to give up his trellis. The cells will contribute at least five percent of the museum&amp;#039;s electrical needs and prevent the release of more than 400,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually. The new green technologies are helping to bring a century&amp;#039;s worth of museum history full circle. &amp;quot;The idea of the great beaux arts\u2013era picture galleries was to create a beautiful setting with natural light,&amp;quot; says Celeste Adams, director of the Grand Rapids Museum. &amp;quot;After the Second World War, the big windows and skylights of those museums were sealed to block out the sun&amp;#039;s light and heat.&amp;quot; Precise climate control and artificial lighting were introduced. So arrived what Adams calls &amp;quot;the era of the white box which didn&amp;#039;t let in light. It was like a big refrigerator for art.&amp;quot; Only in museums had modernism been divorced from natural light. But green innovations, with the Grand Rapids Museum and the Academy of Sciences at the forefront, are getting the two back together. &amp;quot;In Italy, you walk into a palazzo and the windows are thrown open and the art just sings to you,&amp;quot; Adams says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the ideal. Now we are creating museums that will bring it back home. It&amp;#039;s the new humanism.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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