Green Museums - a possibility?

The Art Newspaper -- New A brief article in "the Art Newspaper" on the value of 'going green' even in museums. The classic argument that has been promoted by conservators for many years has been that the stringent conditions under which art 'must' be stored are the reason for the highly serviced spaces and hence high energy use of museums. That there might be alternatives to this approach has been discussed, but never proven.

The oft-quoted Gary Thomson book on 'The Museum Environment" can be blamed for a lot: drawers full of unanalysed thermo-hygrograph charts in conservators' offices; the tyranny of the 55%+/-3% RH and 21 degrees C +/- 1degC recommended Humidity and Temperature; but sadly its considerable discussion of the buffering of temperature and more particularly humidity has mostly been restricted in Museum environments to management of storage and display case environments. Unlike the trivial once-over-lightly tone of the Art Newspaper article - a standard journalistic overview of a topic that mentions the US LEED scheme but mentions nothing about the building design. However, it is now possible to find articles on use of building design to manage the internal environment, such as this self-published article: How to design Climatically Stable Museums by Tim Padfield a 'retired museum scientist'.

Back in 1981 and again in 1985 I was involved in the production of two reports on major institutions in New Zealand which were of a design that made their internal environments extremely stable. In one case, the building had no heating system and yet maintained conditions for most of its aretefacts that arguably were better than those now experienced by the artefacts with a full humidity control HVAC system installed. 600mm thick masonry walls, low ventilation rates, large volumes of air and display cases with large areas of internal surfaces of unpainted or unvarnished wood made for thermohygrograph readings that were much more stable than can ever be achieved by electronically controlled on/off running of mechanical plant responding to the changes in the internal conditions in a normal highly insulated / highly serviced box. There was a space in one of these buildings that was conditioned and one could notice the 1 to 1.5 degree drop in temperature below the set point before the heating plant turned on and then a total 3 degree rise before the temperature was 1-1.5degC above the set point and the heating turned off. During this same time the naturally conditioned spaces did not vary noticeably - the graphs were so flat as to appear at first glance to be faulty!

I have been offering this idea as a research topic for students for many years now, to no avail... Some day?