“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

 

Their creations, on display in the museum garden until Sept. 23, have a sort of forehead-thumping “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” quality.

For example, one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. Balancing heavy jerry cans on the head may lead to elegant posture, but it is backbreaking work and sometimes causes crippling injuries. The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

“Most of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers, so they need a business model that lets them make money in three to six months, which is one growing season,” he said. KickStart accepts grants to support its advertising and find networks of sellers supplied with spare parts, for example. His prospective customers, Dr. Fisher explained, “don’t do market research.”

“Many of them have never left their villages,” he said

A developer whose project was expected to set the tone for sprucing up Anaheim’s entertainment district has decided those plans are no longer economically viable, adding fuel to the debate about what types of development belong in the resort district.

The Harbor Boulevard project was initially pitched as a luxury high-rise condo-hotel. But developer Derek Baak said rising construction costs, competitive hotel room rates in the resort district and an unproven luxury hotel market made the original concept untenable in Anaheim. So he’s tweaking the plan, seeking to change from the high-rise, one-tower vision to a smaller hotel with condos in a building at the back.

“If the city is waiting for a luxury hotel-condo project on that site, who knows how long the land will sit there vacant?” he said. “You just can’t build a hotel now without some kind of subsidy.” With more condos added in his new plan, “the condos subsidize the hotel.”

Baak’s proposal has changed from a hotel-condo complex with as many as 300 units of each to a 75-room boutique hotel and 191 condominium units separate from it.

The new proposal, planned for the site of a closed Toys R Us, is proportionally more residential-heavy and further stokes the debate that has engulfed city and tourism officials in Anaheim: Does housing belong in the 2.2-square-mile resort district surrounding Disneyland? City zoning currently prohibits new residential development there.

Baak’s altered plan has been endorsed by city planners and some City Council members but is opposed by the Walt Disney Co.

Disney is opposed to any stand-alone residential project in the resort district, arguing that housing doesn’t mix with tourists and night revelers.

The company recently filed a lawsuit and backed two ballot measures to prevent housing in the district, including Platinum Pointe. That development would consist of about 1,275 condos and 225 low-income apartments near where Disney hopes to build a third amusement park. The City Council last month rezoned the property on a 3-2 vote to allow for wholly residential housing. A vote on the Platinum Pointe project itself could come this year.

Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger weighed in last week, saying a sprawling residential community did not belong near Disneyland and calling the theme park “the best neighbor Anaheim has ever had.”

“We don’t believe that the property being talked about … is as recreation- or business-friendly as the businesses that could go there,” Iger said in his first public comments on the matter.

Baak said his Harbor Boulevard project should be viewed differently because it includes a hotel along the street with condos near the rear of the 5-acre parcel.

“Our project is a good compromise,” said Baak, vice president of West Millennium Homes, which is a co-developer with Renaissance Pacific Properties. “But Disney told us they can’t pick and choose projects, so they are throwing us into the same bucket as the rest because we have residential.”

Baak’s downsized development was part of a March compromise plan offered by Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle and Councilman Harry Sidhu.

But that plan died once Pringle, Sidhu and Disney began pushing a ballot initiative that would forbid housing in the resort zone, created to help extend visitors’ trips by erecting world-class hotels, entertainment venues and restaurants.

Pringle could not be reached for comment.

In a written statement, Disneyland spokesman Rob Doughty said: “The Anaheim Resort Area was created by the City of Anaheim in 1994 to be a tourist-serving area. We believe that the residents of Anaheim have clearly indicated through the recent referendum petition their interest in protecting that vision.”

Disney’s strong opposition hasn’t deterred Baak from moving forward with the project. “Just because we don’t have their support doesn’t mean we won’t continue,” he said. “I think we have the support we need. We’ll continue working with the city and neighbors. We still think it’s the right project in that location.”

Sidhu, who opposes the Platinum Pointe project, said he was “fully supportive” of Baak’s development, because it wasn’t originally part of the resort district and was added only in recent years. Also, Sidhu said the hotel at the front of the property would create a “resort feel.”

Despite his support, Sidhu backs the ballot measure to ban housing in the district.

If the ban gets on the ballot and is approved by voters, the council would have had to approve the Baak project before the February election for it to be built.

“This is a great project,” Sidhu said. “It will clean up that end of Harbor. Disney should work with us on this.”

Frank Elfend, a consultant to the Platinum Pointe project, said Sidhu’s position was inconsistent.

“It would seem to be hypocritical,” Elfend said, “to be part of a movement precluding residential development in one case but be supportive of residential in some other instance.”

New director sees it as model of sustainability — planting begins on building’s living roof

Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Gregory Farrington, the new executive director of the California Academy of Sciences museum being built in Golden Gate Park, is a man of no small ambition.

As workers readied the museum’s “living roof” for the first plantings last week, Farrington, a 60-year-old, Harvard-educated chemist and former president of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, outlined plans to transform the venerable academy in ways that go far beyond architecture.

 

“I don’t get up in the morning hoping that if I work really hard I will be mediocre by 5 o’clock,” he said. “The goal here is to make this the best natural life institution in the world.”

Completion of the $429 million museum project, including a complicated yearlong move-in starting in October, is expected by the fall of 2008. Farrington calls the building a giant exhibit, “as much about the future as it is a museum of the past.”

It rates as one of the most significant undertakings of its kind, promising to bring worldwide attention to the Bay Area’s unique brand of scientific research and cultural innovation. From stem cells to green technology, it’s all part of the program Farrington is planning to put inside — or outside, as in the case of the rooftop garden for native plants — architect Renzo Piano’s glass-walled temple.

The academy, founded in 1853, is the oldest science institution in the West, set up to document with remarkable rigor some of the wonders glimpsed during the Gold Rush era.

After its first big museum in downtown San Francisco was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, the academy became a fixture in Golden Gate Park, where the major attractions included dioramas of African wildlife and extinct birds, along with an ornate alligator habitat that suggested the reptiles may have been natives of Nob Hill.

Hints of those quaint old displays will be part of the new museum, Farrington said during one of his first extended interviews since he began work in February. But the emphasis clearly has shifted away from ancient history — or even contemporary natural history.

The buzzword now is “sustainability,” and the building, packed with energy-saving materials and technologies, is the museum’s largest display.

“Part of what the Cal Academy needs to take up now is showing people what it means to make life sustainable, and to lead in that creatively and intellectually,” Farrington said. “What does sustainability mean to a normal family in a normal life in a normal home? What does it mean for public policy? What are the options? What are the questions?

“We are the natural organization to do that. We will be in a gorgeous park in a gorgeous city, in the middle of one of the greatest clusters of information technology and biotechnology anywhere in the world. If it doesn’t happen here, then where exactly is it going to happen?”

Farrington’s most recent posting was to London, where he served as an international program director and fundraiser for Lehigh, and he has a vacation home in Florida. He admits to some difficulties adjusting to Bay Area life, and at a recent Giants game against the Phillies, he still rooted for the Phillies.

“Nobody told me about the fog and the idea that summer is supposed to be cold,” he said. “I’m used to summer being warm, and winter cold. Some people around here consider high 70s to be a heat spell. I consider that just warming up, but I’m getting used to the weird weather. And I’ve become pretty proficient at the bus lines.”

He’s also joined a long tradition of San Francisco’s new arrivals proclaiming big ambitions in a setting famous for its pioneering approach and dreams of grandeur, even if they may not always be realized.

“The West is a big place — big mountains, big deserts, big ocean, big sky — in a way that the East isn’t,” he said. “Surely the most spectacular topography and natural scenery in the United States is the topography and scenery in the West, and that leads to a certain way of thinking. It’s sort of a fusion of the outdoors and the life of the mind. It’s an expansive view.

“Keep in mind of course that the people who climbed Everest came from London, and in every city in every part of the world you find people who explore,” he said. “What’s so beautiful about this part of the world is this combination of the creativity of human beings and the sheer awesome expansiveness of the outside — the mountains and the sea. It’s really a gorgeous place.”

The California Academy’s management philosophy, which is taking shape along with the building in the park, concerns how to create a museum that is forward-looking, inside and out, instead of a repository of relics and dead things pickled in formaldehyde.

There are plenty of those relics — the academy’s scientific collection includes some 20 million specimens gathered during a century of research forays. Those aren’t being thrown out. In fact, Farrington is now searching for a new research director to freshen up the academy’s historic emphasis on basic science.

As for its public face, however, the idea is to dispense with the dusty shelves and traditional cloistered ambience.

“In the past, museums were these buildings with thick walls and high columns, and they looked like new versions of Greek temples,” Farrington said. “They had lots of steps. They were dark and you went inside them, and oftentimes they were about history.

“What’s been created here in the park is almost the inversion of that. Glass walls. No steps. Light floods into it. And the main issues being addressed by the displays and research, by all the activities in the building, are about the future.”

Preserving the record of evolution, the “history of life,” Farrington said, will be part of the academy’s mission as it has been since the rush to Sutter’s Mill.

But now people in the West are learning to step more carefully, and so the California Academy is moving into its new home with plans to “demonstrate where life is going,” and how even hard-charging, techno-obsessed bipedal hominids may manage to stick around.

“That relates to all sorts of issues — climate change, global warming, survival of the species — survival of all species, but particularly survival of the human species,” Farrington said.

While the new museum and its displays would seem to be enough to draw people there, the academy should heed one lesson learned from opening of the Chabot Space and Science Center atop the Oakland hills in 2000, former Oakland City Councilman Dick Spees said.

“It’s not about a building,” said Spees, who serves on the center’s board of directors. “It’s about a program.” And marketing that program to the public is essential to making sure the people come and keep coming, Spees said.

Farrington acknowledged another one of his planning concerns: how to cope with the inevitable first rush of crowds curious to see the new museum, which is the latest creation of Piano, well-known for designing civic plazas, cultural centers and museums in cities around the world.

Stampedes, ever since the Gold Rush, have always been a part of the West, too, but Farrington promised that people won’t have to wait three hours to get inside to see the future of life on display.

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Natural history moving back to the park

Although most of the construction crews will finish their work this fall on the new home of the California Academy of Sciences, it’s expected to take a full year for all the displays, live animals and collected specimens to settle into the new location in Golden Gate Park and get ready for the first paying visitors in the fall of 2008. Here’s the move-in plan for some of the museum’s key features:

– Native California species are being planted now on the museum’s signature rooftop sustainability display.

– Living trees will be moved into a rain forest display in late November.

– Coral will be moved into a coral reef tank starting in January. That process is expected to continue until early September.

– The planetarium screen will be installed between November and January. Planetarium seating will be installed in February.

– Kimball Natural History Museum exhibits, including African Hall dioramas, will be installed between March and July.

– The Steinhart Aquarium animals will be moved into their tanks starting in February and continuing through September 2008. Stephanie Stone, a museum spokeswoman, said “the order of animal migration is still very much in flux.”

– The tentative plan is to move fish into the coral reef habitat first, followed by bats into the rain forest in April and penguins into their new home, possibly in August 2008, to allow them more time to breed in the museum’s temporary downtown site on Howard Street.

– Botany collections will be boxed by the end of November and sent to an industrial freezer in December for a debugging, then will be moved into the new building in January.

– Fish, reptile and insect collections will probably be next, starting later in January. The rest of the research departments will follow. That phase is expected to be done by the end of June 2008.

Source: California Academy of Sciences

E-mail Carl Hall at chall@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/29/MNGK9Q2VMO1.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle