Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences Blooms and Grows, Balancing Man and Nature

Mr. Piano’s vision avoids arrogance. The ethereality of the academy’s structure suggests a form of reparations for the great harm humans have done to the natural world. It is best to tread lightly in moving forward, he seems to say. This is not a way of avoiding hard truths; he means to shake us out of our indolence.

See a slide show of the Academy and from Flickr photos.

Also, from Pruned:

The New York Times visits Alan Berger and gets a tour of his reclamation project in the Pontine Marshes. Says Berger, “The solution has to be as artificial as the place. We are trying to invent an ecosystem in the midst of an entirely engineered, polluted landscape.” Much earlier, The New York Times tagged along with the landscape architect and his class to a severely polluted mining area in Colorado.