Green Scenes

The slatted roof of Renzo Piano’s modern wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, scheduled to open next year, is white in color but green in design. The “flying carpet,” as the architect has dubbed it, is actually a sunscreen that will greatly reduce electricity consumption by working with an automated dimming system to regulate light levels in the galleries. For the new Miami Art Museum, to be completed in 2011, Herzog & de Meuron’s design includes a vast canopy—in effect, a second roof—to shield the structure from the subtropical sun. Environmentally conscious undertakings such as these are the way of the future for many American art institutions.

“Smart museums were doing it five years ago,” says Sarah Brophy, co-author of The Green Museum: A Primer on Environmental Practice, due out this summer from AltaMira Press. “Everyone who is planning a new design or renovation better be planning green, or they will be late.”

According to a 2006 study by the construction consulting firm Davis Langdon, the average price of an environmentally friendly building is no greater than that of a traditional one. And when museums factor in the reduced cost of electricity, as well as the goodwill created among visitors—and donors—going green just makes sense.

But energy efficiency is more complicated for museums to achieve than for, say, office buildings, since the special lighting and temperature controls used to conserve artworks can’t just be turned off at the end of the workday. Architect Kulapat Yantrasast’s Grand Rapids Art Museum, which opened in October, is the first such facility certified in its entirety by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). It features complex lighting, air-conditioning and insulation systems that conserve power, including adjustable UV-filtered glass in the gallery windows and skylights. In June, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is opening its Tadao Ando–designed expansion, which relies on specially dug geothermal wells to heat and cool the building.

Older museums can go green retroactively: Many are sending out mailings electronically and even serving organic and local food in their cafés. The Getty Center, in Los Angeles, which was the first institution in the country to receive LEED certification for an existing building, rented goats this past May to nibble away the flammable brush on its adjacent hillside—preferable to chopping it down and trucking it away.

“As the green industry gets better at what it does, it will learn more about how to adapt to the special needs of museums,” says Brophy. “Being green is a journey, not an end goal.”

"Green Scenes" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.