“Is the silver an aesthetic choice?” I ask. “Not in here, but in the general area with the visitors it’s grey and that is an aesthetic choice,” replies Tim van der Spoel, head of facilities at the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. We are standing next to the temperature system in the museum’s climate-control room. Installed in 2019, the equipment fills the concrete space with silver piping and monochrome machinery the size of three large trucks.

Designed by architects MVRDV, the Boijmans Depot is a reflective bowl of a building in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, whose curving, mirrored, glass-covered facade owes its shape to Blanda, the classic silver Ikea salad bowl – at least according to urban legend. But considering its internal maze of floating stairs, metallic tubing and sliding doors, a sci-fi spaceship might be a more appropriate visual comparison. Any visions of takeoff are misguided, however, given that the Depot is intended to stay strongly rooted in Rotterdam’s cultural life for decades to come – it is, after all, the world’s first publicly accessible art-storage facility, connected to the city’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, an art museum that currently holds some 151,000 objects. Prior to the Depot’s opening in late 2021, only 8 per cent of the museum’s collection could be publicly displayed. Through the new building, the entire collection is now held in one publicly accessible facility. In this sense, the Depot is a steward of Dutch heritage and its future.

But what happens when that future comes under threat? In October 2021, a report was published by the Netherlands Museums Association titled ‘Museums can’t just put a warm sweater on’, which raised concerns from 470 Dutch museums that are struggling with the country’s sharp rise in energy costs – a growing crisis echoed across Europe. Some Dutch museums are seeing a rise of up to 300 per cent in their bills, and are reporting that, as a result, they expect to have 37 per cent less money to finance cultural projects for the future. Warning that “impoverishment of the museum landscape is imminent”, the report’s authors note that some museums will have “significantly less budget for exhibitions to attract visitors”.[1]

While all of Europe has been limiting energy use to combat high energy prices, a situation that has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, museums do not have the option of cutting back. Owing to art preservation policies, museums have to maintain precise climate controls in their visitor halls and archive spaces. “Lowering the temperature is not a solution for museums,” the report states. “If you turn down the heating, you have to compensate by removing more moisture from the air, which in turn costs energy.” The past, or future, of Dutch cultural heritage is being challenged by the price of energy. As such, the museums in the report have asked for tailored financial support from the Dutch government, arguing that there is little that they can do themselves to remedy the situation. “Institutions cannot,” they noted, “simply absorb cost increases on this scale.”

At the time of writing, the Dutch parliament is discussing solutions to this issue. While some financial support, outlined in a public memorandum, is expected for the educational and cultural sector over the coming year, the response has also stated that “organisations themselves remain responsible for keeping energy costs manageable, for example by using less energy.”

This represents a pivotal moment for museums and archives, with calls for energy efficiency driven by financial strain having unexpectedly aligned with environmentalist endeavours. Environmentalism and sustainability have been popular topics at museums for years, but the infrastructural sustainability of their sites has rarely been confronted. To date, the cultural sector has seemed better equipped to tackle these issues in their conceptual, theoretical and social forms. While exhibitions such as The Energy Show (2022) at Het Nieuwe Instituut and It’s Our F***ing Back Yard (2022) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam reveal that curatorial engagement with these topics is at an all-time high, the actual infrastructure, architecture and design of museums and archives remains far behind.

This dilemma confronts the concept underpinning such institutions. Since their establishment as cultural sites, they have been considered (or like to consider themselves) forebears of wider cultural progress,[2] and with the climate emergency threatening our very existence, it makes sense that the issue of sustainability should be attended to through artworks, curatorial programmes and discourse. But is that really enough? Transferring curatorial good intentions into quantitative change involving infrastructural design lies beyond the traditional scope of the museological field, yet it is necessary. For now, Dutch governmental agencies have no common policy in place for investigating or demanding sustainable goals for museums.

Sustainability and energy efficiency are strongly linked in the case of archives, with pressure mounting from all sides. Unlike most spaces, which are awaiting a warm summer so they can lower their thermostats and save energy, museums do not only regulate temperature, but humidity as well. Relative humidity – the ratio of how much water vapour is in the air and how much water vapour the air could potentially contain at a certain temperature – complicates things. It varies according to the temperature of the air: colder air holds less vapour, hot air, more. Changing the temperature can therefore affect the relative humidity, making climate regulation more difficult in summer than in winter.

Back in the Boijmans Depot, van der Spoel speculates that the facility’s highest energy bills will come in the summer, when the climate-control systems have to work harder to lower the temperature, as well as removing the water vapour in the air. “We have an unusual system with only three regulators,” he explains. “In my opinion, we should have had five systems, with a regulatory system per floor.” Instead, the museum has a single central system that connects with different spaces through air ducts. This “takes up less space,” notes van der Spoel, but “it’s not necessarily energy efficient. With the high energy prices, we may have to rethink that.”

The Boijmans Depot’s climate-control installation is uncommon in the world of art preservation because, as van der Spoel explains, it centralises the way it processes air. It sucks in air from outside, which it then processes into three forms: cold and wet, dry, and warm. These airs are then transported through ducts to each zone, where they are mixed in the ratio each area requires. “It allows us to do this with just one main system,” says van der Spoel. “If we were to do this in a more traditional system, much more space would be needed.” As such, it seems that design and engineering considerations, rather than sustainability or energy efficiency, drove the decision to use a more complicated system.

Nonetheless, the building has been hailed in many quarters as exceptional, on account of it being the first art depot where visitors can gain year-round access to rooms housing private and corporate collections.[3] Artworks are segregated by materials and preservation requirements, and the Depot has been celebrated as a means for audiences to gain access to art outside the confines of traditional museological display. Yet allowing audiences into the archive is unusual for multiple reasons. “We are doing a totally new concept,” explains Sandra Kisters, the Boijmans Museum’s director of collections. “We are now receiving visitors in our storerooms, so in our evaluation of the concept of the Depot it’s of course interesting to see if more damage is done by inviting the audience in. But it is the first year that we have been open and there have been no real incidents.”

The risk of damage to artworks because of reckless visitor behaviour is not the only reason archives may choose to exclude the public from their collection rooms. Letting people into climate-controlled spaces means doors opening and closing more often, as well as the presence of bodies and breath that raise temperatures and humidity. This puts pressure on energy efficiency, particularly given that power is now more expensive.

Experimentation and innovation on the preservation front have stalled for a long time, in large part because there was little monetary incentive to prioritise them – there was no perceived need to change operating procedures when energy was cheap. With financial pressure, however, careful testing of new, more energy-efficient alternatives has become permissible. “The thing we are looking into now is that the climate zones’ fluctuation [has been] set very tight,” Kisters explains. “I think [we allow] only 2 per cent fluctuation.”

Back in the silver climate-control room, the machines are buzzing and I can’t help but feel that this is the sound of energy being guzzled all around me. “The system uses a lot of energy because it produces a climate zone by pumping cold air, then hot air, then cold, then hot, into a space,” says van der Spoel. This results in a very jittery fluctuation, and the aim is to smooth this jitteriness out. “To solve this problem completely, however, we would have to take this system out,” van der Spoel explains. “But that means taking out an installation that was built just a year ago, and that’s not possible. What is being talked about, however, is that we accept that we could allow a bigger margin for the permitted climate.” This idea aligns with new developments in conservation studies,[4] which have demonstrated that artworks can handle larger climatic fluctuations than previously thought, provided they are neither too sudden, nor too extreme.

Experimentation with archival climate zones is a nuanced task, given that collections and their material requirements vary greatly. Knowledge is not always transferable and each archive has to conduct its own experiments. Van der Spoel takes me into the Depot’s colour photography collection space – it is, he explains, still too warm for storage. The photographs have to stay in a colder space, otherwise their chemicals would be at risk of denaturing – a process in which molecular bonds begin breaking down. Consequently, the area is filled with empty metal grid walls, onto which staff will mount the photographs once the room’s climate has been perfected. A year and a half into this process, the difficulty of the task is obvious.

Yet again, the museum’s climate system seems to be to blame. “If we knew the exact problem, we would have solved it by now,” says van der Spoel, “but we suspect the way the control technology is configured is the problem.” The current system is based around relative humidity, whereas van der Spoel wonders whether “many of the problems would be solved if we controlled based on absolute humidity.” The problems, he explains, are “not exactly normal in a traditional system”, with the complexity of the Boijman’s set-up making them “difficult to solve” – as it stands, they hope to have the issues resolved by June 2023. The engineering of the Depot’s climate-control system was done by the Royal HaskoningDHV (RHDHV), an engineering-consultancy firm, and while its system is innovative in its precision and compact, its centralised design makes its energy consumption harder to master, placing sustainability on the back-burner.

That the Depot seems not to have considered sustainability as being an overarching priority in its construction reveals the imbalance between heritage, energy costs and sustainability in the cultural field. “We made a programme of demands for the building for the Depot in 2012, and I don’t think sustainability or energy efficiency were as big issues then as they are now,” explains Kisters. “When you have a building project, it takes so much time that maybe we would’ve changed some demands if we were to do it now,” she continues. “It’s been a long time since the plans began. so the type of climate-control installation was, I think, mainly chosen to have this excellent climate system with five different climate zones for the collection.” Bureaucratic decision-making that works to disperse accountability can make sustainability a low priority. Facilities staff do what the collection directors tell them, while collection directors do what is expected by project leaders, and permitted in conservation and insurance policies. As such, unless a clear written directive comes down from above, the discussion around sustainability is likely to keep ping-ponging around on a bureaucratic level.

“Next year, we have to write our new four-year programme because we have a subsidy system where every four years you write a plan and then you get funding from the Rotterdam municipality,” explains Kisters, adding that this funding covers around half of the museum’s total expenditure. Yet these subsidies come with conditions. “We haven’t seen requirements for [the new] plan from the municipality yet,” says Kisters, “but in the last term, the focus was on inclusivity and diversity, cooperation with other parties in the city, and stimulating smaller initiatives. I would imagine they will now also ask for sustainability goals.”

A fundamental transformation of collecting practices may be needed in the long term. The Museum of 21st Century Design (M21D) is an international organisation launched in 2020, which has adopted a new approach to serving the public. Instead of having a permanent building, M21D seeks to initiate publications, online collections, and physical exhibitions in a variety of locations. William Myers, founding director of M21D, explains that “one way to look at it is that museums are a typology in flux.” Changing cultural and social norms, along with the climate crisis, he says, are forcing institutions to shift their goals and offerings. “Somewhat similar to a library, or university, or even a church, they are always reinventing themselves and developing. It seems to me that museums are undergoing some of the biggest changes. They’re finding new ways to serve the public.”

M21D has focused on digital collecting, which is not uncommon at a time when many art institutions have an ongoing digitisation programme. While data servers also use energy to preserve these collections, the goal is to create more accessible archives given that storage and transportation of the works takes on a different form, with slightly smaller carbon footprints. “When it comes to material heritage such as painting or sculpture, human civilisation ought to invest in the energy, time and space to keep it forever and to protect it,” says Myers. “I believe that. But I distinguish that from works of design that are mass produced. While there may be artistry to [this], it represents a series of manufacturing transactions that should be collected, but not in the same way.” Rather than building an archive of unique objects, for instance, Myers plans to focus the design archive of M21D on collecting research, design processes and social narratives about objects – information that is easier and more appropriate to store in digital archives.

Myers’ point, then, is not that we should digitise all art collections, but rather re-think future ones. Kisters, for example, has also been considering what and how to collect differently. “I really love complex artworks that you can construct,” she explains. “We have a work by Olafur Eliasson in the Depot [Notion motion (2005)] that, in storage, consists of several HMI lamps, tripods, stainless steel, a sponge and a motor. When we build it, we use these materials, as well as wood, nylon and a projection screen, follow the artist’s instructions, and it becomes a huge installation. In collecting, you can think about what you collect and what this means for your storage.”

While it won’t solve the issue of needing more environmentally friendly archive storage designs, the focus on works that are easy to store can put a stopper on archives that would otherwise need to expand, and use more space and energy. It also means that there may be a domino effect on art practices, with modular works potentially gaining value for collectors. While we are a long way from sustainability over-shadowing artistic expression, the pressure that collectors and institutions such as the Depot feel is a sign that times are changing, and that we all have to bear the burden.

It’s cold and grey outside as I leave the Depot. Its mirror-clad facade sparkles amongst its surroundings – a physical reminder of the cultural treasures within. But will its lustre remain as limitations on resources are rapidly shifting society’s needs and possibilities? The longer I look at the Depot, the more the silver bowl begins to resemble a magpie’s nest, and I spot myself reflected on its surface. Insignificant amongst the looming towers of Rotterdam, I understand how small I am within the monumental effort that society must make if we are to fundamentally change our behaviour in light of climate collapse. Business decisions, engineering ingenuity and cultural concepts all need to come together in the battle for survival. A tight budget may incentivise that union, but will it be enough, and will the new relationship be a happy one? I tear my eyes away from the shimmering beauty, and imagine how strangely it may shine in a landscape that may soon turn vengeful if we do not better care for it.

1 Quotes translated from the original Dutch.

2 The 2022 definition of “museum” by the International Council of Museums states that “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.

3 A model that is to be employed in the planned V&A East Storehouse, a new outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that is scheduled to open in spring 2024.

4 The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) states that “continued scientific research has shown that it is completely possible for museums to continue to preserve and protect their collections without rigid climate control.”

Words Tiiu Meiner

Illustrations Hollie Fuller

This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.

A View from the Magpie’s Nest

Bowl of Shadows

Design Line: 22 – 28 July