Making the California Academy of Sciences Sustainable Inside as Well as Out

A Sept 16 2009 article, written by Alyssa Walker and published in Fast Company, describes how the creative team responsible for exhibits, including executive producer Jonathan Katz and design firm Volume Inc. carried through the sustainability mandate at the new California Academy of Sciences. Choice of materials, technologies, production methods and the modular kit-of-parts all played a part in making the museum a model of sustainability inside and out. Read the article here.

One Year On, the Remarkable Success of the California Academy of Sciences

The new California Academy of Sciences attracted 2.2 million visits in its first year - well ahead of the 1.7 million that had been projected. In this Sept 18 2009 article, Academy director Gregory Farrington tells the San Francisco Examiner that he never anticipated he would one day leave the east coast for California and become head of what is now said to be the second-most visited attraction in the Golden State.

Click here to read the article, by Kamala Kelkar.

Bemusement comments on the green life of Jonathan Katz

Click here to read the story.

Jonathan Katz, Executive Producer of "Altered State" Exhibit at California Academy of Sciences to Speak at Colloquium May 30 in Berkeley

Jonathan Katz, CEO of Cinnabar Inc. and executive producer of the "Altered State" exhibit on climate change for the new California Academy of Sciences, will speak to the museum/academic community about risk-taking at the May 30 Risk and Reality colloquium organized by Dr. Susan Spero of John F. Kennedy University in San Francisco.

The colloquium runs 10:00 a.m. to 3.30 p.m., at the JFKU Berkeley campus, 2956 San Pablo Avenue. Attendance is free to JFKU students, faculty and staff, $15 for alumni, and $30 for the general public. Katz's presentation, "Seven Rules of Risk," will examine the nature of creative risk and provide specific tools for its successful mitigation. "Taking creative risks is an integral part of developing exhibits that raise vital social and political issues," says Katz. "Instead of trying to avoid risk, which in the museum community is all too often the typical response, we need to learn to embrace risk..." Full announcement here.

Academy visitors share their ideas on combating climate change at Altered State's "Share Your Ideas"

Jonathan Katz writes about a hugely popular, low-tech interactive within the "Altered State" exhibit on climate change he executive produced for the new California Academy of Sciences:

“'Share Your Ideas,' is located at the center of 'Altered State,' within the Arena for Engagement where the content focuses on communities, families and individuals.
In this simplest and most direct of interfaces, visitors write and sketch their own suggestions and ideas for conserving energy, reducing carbon footprint and combating climate change. Pencils and slips of paper about the size of luggage tags are supplied by the Academy for this purpose. Visitors hang their completed entries on hooks for others to view. People respond to the succinct format: each individual entry has the feeling of a work of art..."

Full article here.

"Green Acres" - IPM magazine and Exhibit Builder story about the Academy

"There are institutions that say they are green, and then there are those that shout
GREEN from their rooftops..." writes Martin Palicki in this feature story that was published in Exhibit Builder magazine, reprinted in IPM magazine and distributed at the 2009 American Association of Museums expo... Full article here.

"Imagine receiving the following creative brief..." (SEGDdesign magazine)

Leslie Wolke of fd2s wrote a feature article about the new Academy for SEGDesign magazine, which is published by the Society for Environmental Graphic Design:

"Imagine receiving the following creative brief:

'Collaborate with a Pritzker Prize winning architect, evolutionary biologists and ecologists, and the staff of a 157-year-old acclaimed research institution to create a new generation of sustainable exhibition design for a space bathed in natural light and without walls, in the middle of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.'

This was the challenge that brought together Jonathan Katz, founder and CEO of Cinnabar, a Los Angeles-based production and fabrication company, and Adam Brodsley, principal and co-founder of Volume Inc., a multi-disciplinary design studio in San Francisco. Katz, Brodsley, and a bevy of designers and exhibit specialists produced two main attractions for the new home of the California Academy of Sciences, the 412,000-sq.-ft. LEED Platinum museum that is transforming the definition of that word by its very being..."

Full article here.