This September, after eight years and a half billion dollars spent, world-renowned architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built – the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Piano has said he envisioned a facility that would be visually and functionally linked to its environment. It had to be green and sustainable to go with its purpose, the study of the earth and science.

Beneath the hills, visitors will find a natural history museum, a planetarium, a rain forest (enclosed in a glass dome) with free flying birds, a theater for viewing the cosmos, a coral reef inhabited by 4,000 fish, and an aquarium filled with saltwater pumped in from the Pacific Ocean, plus an exhibition on climate change and the earth’s future.

The museum’s green rolling hills will not be just a green structure, but will help cool the building, absorb storm water, and prevent up to 3.6 million gallons of runoff from carrying pollutants into the eco-system each year, (according to data supplied by the museum).

With its porthole skylights on its flowering rooftop, the academy will likely be a beautiful piece of architectural history.