Think Tank: The Future Museum

Mark Jones

This is the second of the V& A ThinkTanks. We're extremely grateful to our partners in this, particularly the RIBA. It's very good of you to come here today. Just before I introduce you, Chris [Rapley], if you don't mind, I thought I would just try and say a couple of things about museums and climate change.

I've been working in museums for a long time, and in the whole time that I've worked in museums, they have been overwhelmingly committed to taking a green view of life, and over that time they have made no progress whatever in giving reality to that. Actually, what we've seen over the period in which I've worked in museums is that every display is more energy consumptive than the one which it replaces, and that almost every new building is specified to achieve environmental conditions, which can on the whole only be achieved by the introduction of elaborate M& E.

And it's not only museums that are guilty in this, the conservation world has laid down standards, which people think it behoves them to achieve. The HLF insists as a condition of grant on the achievement of standards like PS5454. But I do think that substituting the recycling of paper for serious thought about the core function of museums has really not been good enough, and what I hope this ThinkTank will do is to help us begin to do what I would say we have begun to do at the V& A, which is to challenge these assumptions, and to refuse to meet the standards that have traditionally been called for; to understand the building in much more - and its behaviour - in a much more sophisticated way than has been the case in the past. To notice that very often those three conditions basically in practice function much less well than less closely conditioned spaces.

To think much more seriously about the real degrees of risk, posed to objects by the different kinds of environment, to think more seriously about the history of objects, and what that tells us about their capacity to survive.

To think about whether we need to ask our visitors to put on overcoats when it's cold rather than heating up cold museums to keep them warm. And these, all these kinds of issues, are the ones which I think can help the museum world to move from where it still is today, which is that every new building, which comes on stream is more energy consumptive than the one that it replaces, to one in which we can, as it were, hold up our heads, and at least say that our behaviour is comparable to or better than those of other sectors. So this is my hope and wish for today.

And now I'd now like to introduce Chris Rapley, Director of the Science Museum, who knows much more about climate change than I do.

[Applause]

Peter Gingold

Thanks, Chris. I don't know if anyone saw him on the television with Nigel Lawson the other day and he deserves a medal for not actually taking him by the scruff of the neck and throttling him!

My name's Peter Gingold. I'm a director of an organisation called Tipping Point and, if you just give me a couple of minutes, the vast part of today's effort is about yourselves but I just want to explain why I'm here. We … our, my organisation focuses entirely on these, if you like, the intersection between climate change and the cultural sector and the arts. We're interested in where, where those two meet and trying to help stimulate more activity there. And what we believe, we believe two things, I think. One is that Chris is right. Chris, I've heard him give presentations like that over a number of years and, on the whole, as with other people in this sector, the tone gets a little bit more downbeat as the years go by and people, consistently scientists, as I'm sure most of you know, find themselves saying 'it's worse than we thought'. And the other thing we believe in is that the cultural sector is really the right … is very, very strongly positioned to take the lead on this.

Why is that? Because I think at heart this issue is about the way we live, it's about who we are, what our relationship is with each other and the planet. And the cultural sector is perfectly positioned, I believe, to hold up a mirror to that and actually show us how we live, give us, give us … help us develop insights in that. Now, our … the way see things is divided into two. It's partly about the work itself and the material that's on exhibition in galleries and so on, and the work of living artists as well, and that's clearly an issue which requires enormous subtlety and it's a very difficult and interesting challenge for curators, for artists to work out how do they respond to climate change. And then there's another bit which we can sort of somewhat simplistically but hopefully distinguish from that, which is the nuts and bolts of what we do, the, the way buildings work, the way touring happens, the way audiences move around, etc, etc, - the practical things. And so that's clearly what we're here to do, to talk about today.

[There followed an exercise where participants were asked to position themselves in the room under a sign that best described where their institution was currently placed, using a scale of just beginning to recognise the need for action for climate change to being fully compliant.]

Sunand Prasad

Thank you very much, Peter, that was brilliantly handled, and an amazing amount of stuff came out of that.

I was thinking, in what way is this sector different from any other? Because you know, you go to sessions about what you can do about housing, what you can do in schools, but here we are and what we are doing is museums. Now, thinking that actually there are probably far more similarities than there are actually differences, in terms of the building, businesses and so on.

But culturally, the kind of cultural differences, materially, probably, the kinds of things that Mark's been talking about - about conservation, relative humidities and temperature controls, possibly the slightly bureaucratised environment in which they are enforced, rather than continuously questioned and continuously revisited, it seems to be one area where there really needs to be a lot of attention paid. And I detect that the level of engineering, and understanding and science, isn't of very high quality at the moment. For example, what passive measures might be put in place? Where will the kind of right degree of passive measure and the lowering the standards actually intersect and produce a decent answer, rather than just assume it's going to be like that, so we go and have mechanical ventilation, which I think we had here by the way, and I'm feeling cold, [laugh], on a day like this. So then there are other things like visitor numbers and travel - which I'm sure is a problem that so many other spaces - it's far from only museums - and staff travel and the movement of goods and artefacts, and so on. So, probably, there's quite a lot to learn from other sectors, there may be one bit which is specialised, but it's probably quite a small bit, and probably in the scheme of things the energy used on that small bit is probably not that great. Although, of course, this is, we very well know we have to actually do everything on every front and not say, this is a priority and this is not.

So it seems to me that the main thing I have learnt is that we are in a learning phase. There is a lot to learn, for example, from abroad, from each other, from just benchmarking what everybody is doing and seeing how, perhaps surprisingly, you find some museums, for reasons that are not yet understood, seem to be doing much better than others. I don't understand why that is.

When we benchmarked, when we measured the carbon footprint of the RIBA, we expected it to be extremely poor, but it turned out to be roughly medium in terms of office buildings. That's nothing to boast about, by the way, but it was, I wasn't exactly relieved but I thought that's strange, it's, it's actually around 70 to 80 tons per square metre. And of course that's the reason - it's a very deep planned building, it's a very, very deep planned and a very compact building, so, quite unexpectedly, this kind of elephant is quite useful in some ways, elephant is not actually doing too badly. [laughter] So there are those kinds of learnings to do and measurement and, above all, I think there's an enormous urgency to this. It's fantastic this is happening, but there was one small bit in the graph that Chris showed where he showed the predicted lowering of… raising of Arctic temperatures and the loss of ice, Arctic sea ice. And the real observations are so significantly far different from what was predicted that I think a lot of people are wondering whether all these models which are conservative models - and you said that because they are like consensus - these conservative models may well be far too conservative and their situation may be worse than we think.

How to convey this is a big challenge. As communicators, the museum sector, I think, if it could actually communicate the urgency of the issue, and that would be an enormous contribution for a start. And then, of course, to show that through their own corporate behaviour and to advertise and make known what that corporate behaviour change is, would be a great thing to have. But the most important thing, it seems to me, is to just communicate just how important it is to do this, and if you like, how overdue this action is. Thank you. [applause]