Posted: August 31st, 2022

Postmodernism Analysis of California Academy of Sciences

Postmodernism Analysis of California Academy of Sciences

Postmodernism in architecture is the comfort and style in a building that addresses the needs of the present generation. Long gone are the days when buildings were made with heroic legance of tall Neo-classical columns and industrial minimalism of modernism. Postmodernism brought an evolution and a synthesis of all the technological advances and creative artistic innovations that fueled the pace of art history and propelled it forward. It enabled architects to merge Art and functionality. According to Venturi, the categorization of postmodernism is not what the society has come to accept, such that anything that defies modernism with a unique design or imagery is referred to as a postmodernist. This is not the case. Amy Dempsey describes postmodernism as the rediscovery of color, ornamentation and symbolic connections, as a rejection and advancement of modernism (Best and Douglas 6). We seek to evaluate the characteristics of postmodernism by evaluating the California Academy of Sciences.
The California Academy of Sciences building is confirmation of the expression in postmodernism. It has been rooted in a cultural history that stretches back through modernism to the classical Greece (Jencks 18). It acts as a reminder of the civilizing function of great art in a barbaric age. From the view among the nearby sycamores, the science academy gives the impression of a weightless building. There is a row of steel columns, 36 feet high each along the façade and this gives the building a classical feel, a sense of lightness and the canopy above the roof give the illusion that the roof is just millimeters thick. The building can be thought to be a section of a park that is carpeted in flowers and shrubs, lifted up from the ground and suspended in midair. This is the essence of postmodernism, to defy the norms and create a beautiful expressive work of art.
Besides the façade, there is also a backdrop of concrete that forms the rest of the building, being a source of reinforcement and also adding on to its rectangular shape (Best and Douglas 7). There are two stylistically different walls, with no windows that line the exhibition halls and touching the glass curtain walls at the entrance. The wall on the left is the Neo-Classical limestone wall that survived the 1989 earthquake while the one on the right is a simple poured-concrete wall (Wels 14). These limestone walls bear the reliefs of Doric columns and a restored African Hall that contains original dioramas and ornamented vaulted ceilings which belong to the Neo-classical style of the old Academy that has been brought into symbiosis by the flat roof and linear forms of modernism. The California academy of Sciences is therefore a perfect example of postmodernism because it is a fusion of two seemingly contradictory styles that have been used together and work in harmony.
On entering, the entire space at the lobby seems to let the outside in through the see-through glass walls that open up to the lush Golden Gate Park (Tabb and Deviren 20). There are rows of narrow window lining the top of the building from which the warm air escapes creating a temperature-balanced environment. The unity of nature is emphasizes throughout the museum. The two 90-feet tall spheres of the planetarium and the rainforest are space-cutting and heavy-set structures but their positioning in the museum works to their functional and stylistic advantage. The planetarium containing baby sharks and skate fish sits on the coral reefs while a spiraling ramp next to it lads the visitors from the base to the top of the rainforest microclimates. With its motto as “to explore, explain and protect the natural world,” the Academy is also a center for interactive educational programs with more than 20 events each day (Tabb and Deviren 22). It also has a working library that has see-through walls from which the visitors passing can see the scientists busy at work.
The mounds of earth on the roof, hollow inside, overlap the spheres contained within, creating waves that are a visual symbolism of the hilly San Francisco area (Wels 16). The roof also acts as a living laboratory from where the visitors can observe the plants and animals inhabiting it. The photovoltaic cells installed on the roof’s edges convert sunlight to electricity as the skylight windows open and close automatically to accommodate the temperature shifts in the museum’s interior.
One would expect that the Academy is made of everything science and for science. However, it is also home to creative artistic symbolism with the Maya Lin sculpture that embraces the roof of the West Terrace to show how symbolism can be incorporated in technology as a symbol of how nature is intertwined. The sculpture’s form is based on San Francisco’s topography that maps the U.S. Geological survey on a scale of 1:700 and a vertical exaggeration, five times above sea level and to times below (Galinsky 21). The adjacent columns are also marked to indicate the sea level at 18 feet above the café terrace. The sculpture is an extension of the weightless feeling of the open plan of the building and its flat glass roof forming a perpendicular body that highlights its measurement scale and makes the surrounding landscape a natural backdrop.
In conclusion, the roofline, the façade, the interior structure and the symbolic sculpture only reinforce the museum’s postmodernism highlighting the multiple stylistic adaptations and integrations of function and form into the greatest facility that supports environmental education and public communication.
Works Cited
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York [u.a.: Guilford Press, 2007.
Galinsky, Karl. Classical and Modern Interactions: Postmodern Architecture, Multiculturalism, Decline, and Other Issues. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.
Jencks, Charles. The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture. Chichester: Wiley, 2011.
Tabb, Phillip, and A S. Deviren. The Greening of Architecture: A Critical History and Survey of Contemporary Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Co, 2013.
Wels, Susan. California Academy of Sciences: Architecture in Harmony with Nature. San Francisco, Calif: Chronicle Books, 2008.

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