To construct the most ambitious green building imaginable, the California Academy of Sciences required its architects, engineers, and builders to become walking encyclopedias. They needed to know, for example, the heat load capacity of an enclosed rainforest dome, the root development of wild strawberries, the engineering dynamics of helical cement walking paths, and the artificial light requirements of a coral reef. Kang Kiang, the local project architect, was pleased when the Academy chose to base the ground floor of its rainforest exhibit on the rainforest in his native Borneo. It was one less thing to learn on the job.

"We joked that we were all perfectly qualified to build the next combination planetarium-rainforest-natural history museum-aquarium that came along," says Matt Rossie, a project manager at Webcor Builders who worked on the Academy for two years.

The 410,000-square-foot building started with a sketch of a few lines by world-renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano. His conception, which mirrored the hills of San Francisco, got him the job. Piano then invited collaboration—with San Francisco-based Kiang's firm, Stantec, and with Webcor, and with many, many others—which helped the project leaders turn almost every fanciful sketch into reality.

Now complete after three years of construction, the complex will house a living coral reef, planetarium, natural history museum, rainforest dome, and research offices, all under a rolling, living roof that looks as if the builders had lifted up a piece of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and stuck a museum underneath it. Although Piano is rightly hailed for his imagination, someone still had to turn that vision into steel and concrete and living strawberry plants. In the end, Rossie says, "It comes down to a pipe fitter in the field looking up at the roof steel, saying, 'How the hell am I going to do that?'"

"I need to talk about the roof," Kiang says. "How do you pour concrete on a curving beamed roof?" Rossie, equally animated on the subject, leaps from his chair to sketch a diagram of the roof's occasional 40-degree slope. "When you're on a 40-degree slope and you pour concrete onto it, that's a problem, because it's subject to"—here he rapidly draws a bunch of downward arrows—"gravity." The solution: super quick-drying concrete sprayed through a high-pressure hose.

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