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From the outside, you could imagine that the new California Academy of Sciences was built by hobbits. With its green roof, covered in small hills of vegetation and dotted with round, porthole-like windows, the daring new building seems distinctly pastoral.

But in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, any appearance of calm is deceptive. Two venerable institutions – the academy, a renowned science centre, and the De Young Museum, one of the city's top art museums – have been reborn in landmark new buildings. Together, they've given the massive urban park a shot of new energy.

“It's really renovated attitudes about the park. It's just been jam-packed,” says Larry Reed, a Californian who visited the academy as a child and grew up to become one of the landscape architects behind its new green roof – one that's giving visitors a good reason to make the trek away from the city's bayfront tourist district, and over to San Francisco's quieter west side.

Perched across a tree-lined concourse from one another, the two new museums are a study in contrasts. The academy, which reopened in a new building last fall, is a celebration of transparency, its green roof floating above a glass-and-concrete structure that makes the building practically see-through. It's a new counterpoint to the four-year-old De Young building, which is low and hulking, distinguished by a twisting viewing tower that juts upward like an upturned obelisk.

The California Academy of Sciences has been on the site since the mid-19th century, but opted to tear down its existing collection of buildings and start anew.

The complex, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, houses a biosphere, a planetarium and an aquarium. It's the biosphere and planetarium dome that account for those mounds on the building's roof.

The museum is teeming with life: A colony of well-socialized penguins huddles in a slightly cramped-seeming Antarctic panorama and a lethargic albino crocodile graces the lagoon in the entrance. In the subterranean aquarium, the tanks full of long, languid sea life make the walls seem like they're made of fish.

But the star attraction here is the biosphere, a four-storey globe that visitors ascend in rain-forest conditions. The biosphere is so full of free-flying butterflies that the museum employs multiple layers of screeners, imploring visitors to shake the insects off themselves lest they hitch a ride out.

Across the way, things are more demure. It's a short stroll to the De Young Museum, where beautiful young things arrive for society events in evening wear. Clad in weathered copper plates, the controversially modern De Young makes a statement of its own, emerging from the ground like earthworks.

Like the academy, the De Young has been in Golden Gate Park since the 19th century, and both institutions were hit hard by the 1989 earthquake. (Huge metal braces had to be used to reinforce the old De Young building.) The new museum was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects behind London's Tate Modern and the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing.

The new building is worth a visit on its own merits: It demonstrates that a museum can adopt intriguing, irregular shapes without upstaging the exhibits. The De Young's collections are housed in a series of tall, enigmatic spaces – some light-filled, some sombre – that draw visitors forward, dropping hints about what's around the next corner. And the tower, rising up above the park, provides a treetop view of the city that shouldn't be missed.

The museum's moody design is especially good at showcasing its collections of looming native sculpture and bombastic American paintings from colonial days. The museum is playing host to an exhibition of artifacts from King Tut's tomb through March 28.

Wandering off from the museum plaza is rewarding in its own right. Rolling up to the Pacific Ocean on the western shore of the city, Golden Gate Park presents a more peaceful side of San Francisco, even on days when the downtown is covered with tourists. It's more than big enough to spend a day getting lost in. “It's … the equivalent of a Central Park for the West Coast,” Reed says.

The park is vintage San Francisco, from the joggers to the lazy drum circles laid out on grassy slopes, a certain herbal scent hanging in the air. Golden Gate Park was the site of an enormous exposition in 1894, which left a legacy of curios hidden among its rolling hills – chief among them a Japanese tea garden, which went on to become a popular tourist attraction. You'll find artificial lakes where you can rent rowboats, a magnificent covered carousel that is so ornate it might intrigue parents as much as kids, and one of the world's largest wood-and-glass flower conservatories.

Clear directional signage is at a premium, so bringing a detailed map is a good idea if you're hunting for something in particular. But then, half the joy is in the discovery. In San Francisco's green space, there's no shortage of new life.

Special to The Globe and Mail

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If you go

Golden Gate Park www.sfgov.org/site/recpark_page.asp?id=17796.

California Academy of Sciences 55 Music Concourse Dr., San Francisco; 415-379-8000; www.calacademy.org. Open Monday to Saturday, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

De Young Museum 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr., San Francisco; 415-750-3600; www.famsf.org/deyoung. Open daily, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.