BioBlitz 2014: volunteers have 24 hours, from noon Friday through noon Saturday, to inventory living things - plants, animals, insects, fungi, even bacteria - in the vast Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The goal is to add to the park's official species list and to stress the importance of protecting biodiversity.

This 80,000-acre urban park is one of the nation's largest and the most beautiful. Spanning 70 miles, it's rich in history, plant life and wildlife. It's also a major feat of rehabilitation and restoration.

Search “San Francisco” in the Getty Images stock-photo library and more than 350 pages of photos will pop up, including of beautiful shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and other SF landmarks.

The highly anticipated “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz,” which opens to the public on Saturday, depends too much on the sort of patience and reflection that few people may ever bring to a tourist destination.

The Golden Gate Bridge’s Round House has been the focal point for the icon’s southern edge. Long a gathering place for miserable out-of-towners in shorts pointing helplessly at impenetrable fog and the spot where Lycra-clad, Sausalito-bound cyclists dodge the 29-Sunset buses, it’s now serving food.

The words of dissidents, political prisoners, and free speech advocates are everywhere in "@Large," a multi-work exhibition by renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei now open on Alcatraz Island — embossed on kites, represented in LEGO portraits, and echoing from speakers hidden behind jail cell vents.

The new interim Crissy Field Center facility at the eastern edge of Crissy Field traveled from conception to near-completion in just nine months. The project was put on the fast track after the starting date for one of the Bay Area's largest and most anticipated public works projects, the reconstruction of the Doyle Drive/Presidio Parkway approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, was moved forward to the summer of 2009 from its original start date in 2011.

Celebrated Chinese dissident, architect and artist Ai Weiwei's highly anticipated exhibition "@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz" will open this fall on September 27th and run through the end of April 2015. The exhibition will feature seven site-specific installations in four different locations on the former federal prison island, three of which are not normally open to the sightseeing public.

Chinese dissident artist and architect Ai Weiwei's major installation @Large opens this weekend inside the former prison building of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

Alcatraz is perhaps the world's most famous prison. And Ai Weiwei is arguably China's best known artist. Now they have come together in a viscerally powerful show in the notorious former jail.