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?

Museums Aotearoa Conference - Auckland 2007

DAY 3: Museums Aotearoa conference, Auckland Museum.











Have been here 30 hours so far. Typing this during the “Museum Architecture Function and Practice” session Friday morning.












I arrived at 9am for the start of Day 2 (Thursday) of this conference, to hear a presentation by Ian Athfield on the Christchurch Museum, Ken Gorbey on the Jewish Museum and Greg McManus director of the Rotorua Bathhouse museum and Jeremy Salmond conservation architects. Later, I heard an elegantly presented presentation by Richard Francis-Jones on his (Australian firm's) design for the refurbishment of the Auckland City Art Gallery. And later in the the day on Thursday, I had the privilege to get behind the scenes of Auckland Museum itself to see the new bits of Noel Lane's design for the refurbishment (rescue?) of the 1960s addition to the museum.

This experience and the Friday session so far has suggested the following ideas for modeling New Zealand museum buildings:
o Auckland Museum – the old and the refurbished (Noel Lane)
o Rotorua (Bathhouse) Museum – 19th C architect – design being ‘completed’ now
o Tauranga Art Museum – David Mitchell of Mitchell Stout architects
o The New Gallery in Auckland – David Mitchell of Mitchell Stout architects (too small?)
o Oamaru Athenaum (too small?)
o The Auckland City Art Gallery (Richard Francis-Jones)
o Canterbury Museum (Mountfort / Athfield?)
o Pataka in Porirua (Architecture +)
o The Dowse Art Gallery (Structon? / Athfield)

AUCKLAND MUSEUM: let’s leave aside the overheating of the top floor conference room in the Auckland Museum (who'd a thought that people would still be designing sloping glass under our sun without external shading?) The kava bowl analogy for the 'intervention' into the 1960s courtyard - now atrium in the Auckland Museum makes for an interesting modelling challenge in the Digital Craft course. Personally, I found the idea of the kava bowl better than the reality - the atrium was a true 'is that all there is?' experience.

I suggest that this building might be modelled by three people to deal with the complexity of the old / new parts. We will still have to deal with the takeover of the older parts of the museum (the 80 year old part) by the curatorial desire to shut out the outside light altogether - darkened rooms; theatrical effects in the words of this (Friday) morning's presentation 'privileging' the artefacts. The Digital Craft modelling exercise is about modelling forms in (day)light and the traditional daylighting of the old building has been closed in / over. Any model of this building for the course will have to work with the traditional daylit design options rather than how the building is used / lit now.



AUCKLAND CITY ART GALLERY: the East gallery in this building has a traditional top lighting scheme and has in a previous refurbishment been destroyed as even a gallery space. The plan is to redevelop this gallery. The plan is also to develop a new top lit gallery. The building has sufficient complexity to allow two people to model. The roof structure has an interesting sculptural elegance. The entry atrium / central focus and access organizer for the gallery visitor experience offers some fascinating potential for light / shade studies. I highly recommend this.

ROTORUA MUSEUM:This is a design that when it was presented troubled me immensely. The director was very proud to state that Resource Consent was obtained in 2 hours. When contrasted with the trials and tribulations faced by Ath with the Canterbury Museum the message seemed to be that to guarantee Resource Consent required a denial of architectural design: just copy a 100+ year old façade and paste it over the outside of a modern box – which is what happens in the Rotorua building.

The director suggested that their plan was merely to complete the original master plan for the building. However, it transpired that the internal planning of these new parts of the building are to be ‘modern’ adaptable gallery spaces – so: boxes that are clothed in 70 tonnes of totara to ‘fit’ with the existing design. Pasting / painting an historic pastiche onto modern boxes..?

That said, this looks to be a very interesting building to model…

CANTERBURY MUSEUM: Ath (Ian Athfield) described a 9 year process of what had been partly design joy and mostly Resource Consent process pain. The analysis he presented of the design was of a building that had been bastardized over an almost 100 year process. The proposed ‘interventions’ had a new modern glass box entry placed into the public face of the existing building, leaving the 80 year old portion intact and breaking into the 1950s kitsch copy of the older façade…

After 9 years the money raised has been given back. The process of restoration of function as well as simple addition has been abandoned. One was left with the distinct impression from contrasting this with the Rotorua experience that kitsch copying of the old is all that will be readily accepted by the community. The question that must be asked is: how has the architecture profession reached this nadir of trust in the general community? Why are architects so little trusted to adapt / alter buildings that the community will not tolerate work of the time, rather than pastiches of the past? People would look askance at someone copying / working in the style of another artist to add to an existing art work – a new panel to a McCahon triptych aping the existing panels anyone?

So little daylight. So little of any merit in the interior spaces to model that I am unsure that this building is suitable as a Digital Craft modeling exercise. Perhaps the atria in the proposed design could be done?

The NEW GALLERY and THE TAURANGA ART GALLERY: David Mitchell waxed lyrical about natural light. He suggested Velcro was a great solution to the problem of the ingress of unwanted light. I was reminded of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – a stunning Mario Botta top lit gallery where black sail cloth with sailing technology fittings for the attachments are used to cover the skylights on the few occasions that darkness is really needed.

David presented two of his designs and some images as varied as John Soane’s gallery in Dulwich and Steven Holl’s Kiasma building in Helsinki. Almost all were characterized by large daylight openings between inside and outside. Unfortunately, I suspect both David’s designs are too small for modeling exercises within the Digital Craft course. They could be really elegant little exercises, but not collaborative projects between two or more people.

Pataka: Darcy Nicholas described success of the accessibility of the shopping centre nature of the thoroughfare plus stop off points ‘style’ of Pataka. Interestingly no mention was made of the architect / architecture in this discussion. I believe that this building is a little too simple and has too little daylight to be a successful Digital Craft model. Worth looking closely at the plans though.

The Dowse Art Gallery: Tim Walker’s contribution to the daylight debate at the Museums Aotearoa conference would suggest that this is not a particularly interesting building to model for the Digital Craft course. He suggested that the whole issue of natural light vs black box is ignoring the significance of the exhibition and claimed that the hip hop exhibition the Dowse ran recently could not have been done in natural light! I recall the old (Structon?) design had the daylight permanently excluded. This is one reason why the building has in the past not been modeled in the Digital Craft course. Now it may be different? Worth a look certainly.

Antoine Predock Museum for Winnipeg

Just adding to the list. The 'Eyesore of the month' entry for the month of March is an Antoine Predock design for the Museum of Human Rights... A roasting as usual. The form, if daylit, may make an interesting challenge if drawings are available.

Check the architect's web site....

We have done buildings by him in the dim (1999)and dark (2004) past. and I note that there are others of his we have not done...

The Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum

Last year I visited Toronto to present a paper with a colleague at the Architecture Music Acoustics conference. We spent only a couple of days in town, but saw the College of Art and Design - the building on stilts. One of the most intense musical experiences of my life was at this building. A re-enactment of the performance of a Xenakis piece (La Legende D'Eer) "...a powerful 7-channel electro-acoustic composition which Xenakis created in 1977-78 to be played in "Le Diatope", a curvaceous architectural construction designed by the composer, together with a visual component including laser lights. ... composed for the opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris..."




Just around the corner from the from the College was the street where Frank Gehry apparently grew up. In wandering around to this and to find brunch we came upon a building that in the first version of this blog last night I thought was the one illustrated here and here. However, it turns out this is some more Libeskind. It is no wonder that it bears little resemblance to the billboard illustration that I photographed last year for the Art Gallery of Ontario. I am interested to see on this web site (where the current pictures are from) how things develop.

And yet another blog about architecture listing museums

Check out this link
It is to a blog known as architecthophilia written by a person from Montserrat... The link is a search of museums on their blog. A couple we did last year. Some are very new and may not have (sufficient) plans ...

Steven Holl’s Knut Hamsen Museum in Norway

Steven Holl’s Knut Hamsen Museum in Norway at // world citizen

Assuming it is possible to find anything useful about this building's dimensions, this could be an interesting building to construct. I am not hopeful you will be able to find or use anything useful on Stephen Holl architect's own web site

Simulation, Simulacra and Baudrillard

"Welcome to the desert of the real."

Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that as I start to write this two men in pink dresses are chatting about the meaning of life on the TV station channel running in the corner of my computer screen. I was looking through my RSS feeds for interesting references on museums and discovered obituaries from The Telegraph and The Times on Jean Baudrillard and - perhaps the most erudite - The Guardian online.

As my research interest is in the field of environmental design decision support tools (eddst's) in architecture it is inevitable that I have come across references to M. Baudrillard. If one is a 'simulationist'
as I am, then one expects discussion of what exactly is the reality one is simulating? However, what was interesting was to ask the nature of the environments we simulationists are 'predicting' in a world where (to quote the Telegraph) "a leading post-modernist thinker and social theorist [is] best known for his concept of "hyperreality" - the theory that modern man can no longer tell what reality is because he has become lost in a world of "simulacra", images and signs created and presented as "real" by the mass media;..."

Where does the hyper-real image of the daylight in a building fit in this theoretical framework? Does it matter? Say we take Doug Mann of the University of Western Ontario at face value:

his central claim about postmodern culture (thought he claims that he himself is not a postmodernist) is quite simple - that we live in a "desert of the real," a cultural space where television, film, and computer images are more "real" to us than the non-media physical reality that surrounds us. This loss of reality isn't so hard to understand, even if it's difficult for some of us to swallow.

Then to what degree do we redefine people's expectations of buildings by showing them this building performance simulation hyper-reality?

Derrida in 2004 and now Baudrillard - who will the obscurantists turn to next?

Wikipedia reference.

Web Pages and the Exercise hand in

The lecture today trawled through the web page tutorial.

We covered the following issues:

• style sheets separate content from presentation
• one could therefore have one page with several style sheets for the computer / telephone / TV viewer to control how the content appears best in each medium
  
• one can therefore change the look and feel of multiple pages if they all refer to the same style sheet, just by editing the style sheet
  
• w3.org maintains standards that we try to make our web pages conform with
• w3.org insists on some standards that make our web pages more accessible (e.g. alt keywords or explanations for images)
• html - HyperText Markup Language uses to mark content e.g. "<"body">" and ""are two tags that appear either side of the content that is to appear in the 'body' or main part of a web page (quotes missing of course - they are there to make these tags appear on the blogger page)
  
• in html the information that appears between "<"HEAD">" and "" will not appear on the web page at all but contains 'meta' information about the page
  
• meta tags could be keywords - appearing inside a tag that reads "<"Meta keywords = "keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" ">" <
• meta tags could also label the "<"TITLE">" "" which contains the title of the web page which appears inside the title bar at the top outside edge of the web browser window
  
• If we use the site function in Dreamweaver to set ourselves up with a local copy and a web viewable copy of our web page, if we change the linking of our page by say changing a file name then Dreamweaver will update all the files that reference the renamed file in the whole site
• only content that is inside the root directory of our local copy web site will be uploaded to be viewable on the remote / web copy
• the language for uploading within the FTP protocol used by Dreamweaver to upload files to the web server is to PUT
• the language for downloading within the FTP protocol used by Dreamweaver to download files from the web server is to GET
• one should ensure that one's use of the internet bandwidth is responsible: e.g. files such as images should be downloaded in the size at which they are to be viewed, not resized by the web page when
  
• to ensure good bandwidth use in the current digital craft exercise: make the 10 images at a reasonable size: then make much smaller copies - thumbnails - Insert the thumbnails as images in your web page and link to the larger images...
• the tag for an image is "<"img src="filename.jpg" ">" this inserts a file whose source is filename.jpg - note the source could be a web reference
• it is considered stealing bandwidth to point to another person's image with a web reference - so that your page loads from your server cheaply, but then loads their image from their server; one should also acknowledge their contribution.
  
• It is considered a mis-use of copyright to save their image and to insert it as if it was yours
• A reasonable manner of using the image might be to save a copy of their image, thumbnail it locally and insert your 'edited' version into your web page with a link and alt text acknowledging source - referencing back to their page/site

Here is one of my recent pictures - from the Circus performance last Saturday at Queen's Wharf - and inserted as an image from Flickr - another way of representing a file and using an online web service (Flickr) to 'serve' the image to the reader.


We also covered the render process for the hand in next week.

Essentially it is a simple process insied Autodesk Viz 2007:

1. Follow the tutorial to each CAD file into Viz. (This will necessitate having exported an AutoCAD drawing format file from AutoCAD ADT and a 3D Studio format file from ArchiCAD)
   
2. Open the material browser in Viz (the button with the coloured balls on it)
3. Open the LS_Mat_eng material file from the P:\Light Studio directory (ticking 'incompatible') and then place some materials into the material slots in the editor
4. Save the Viz file as a filename_ls light studio compatible file.
5. Replace the Light Studio materials with their architectural equivalents in the material editor and save again this time with a filename_mr name suggesting it is Mental Ray compatible
6. Within each LS and MR file set up a sunlight 'system' - a normal sunlight system in the Mental Ray file and a Light Studio system in the Light Studio file
7. You will want to place a camera inside the building for the interior views.
8. Once a camera is placed, you can right click on the viewport name in Viz and select the camera view to be the view seen in that viewport
9. Renders in each renderer with materials attached to the walls roof floor and glazing and a quicktime panorama is what is sought in this exercise...
   

Animation Class lecture 3

Today we spent an hour watching and listening to Walt Disney talking about the Plausible Impossible (IMDB). The message for those seeking to explore the role of the architecture in a movie about buildings - 'Architecture as Actor' - is consistency. The various ideas that were discussed by WD were all made plausible because of some vague connection with the real world - momentum for example - and most importantly because they were presented in a consistent manner. The lesson for architecture as actor is to ensure consistency of viewpoint - and if there is a switch, then to ensure that the switch of viewpoint is made obvious in the manner of the switch (perhaps not a cut transition).

The second hour was spent on the first few slides of the 'storyboard' powerpoint. Ref: BBSC / ARCH