Balancing the Needs of Museum Spaces & Heritage Landscapes with “Green Practices”
The tea house and heritage landscape features at Filoli, a National Trust Historic Site in Woodside, CA.
Okay, so you may be concerned that many of the recommended “green practices” you’ve heard about may negatively impact sacred spaces, character-defining features, archival collections, or heritage landscapes. It is important to remember that these recommendations are tools like any other tool. Just in the way that using a micro-abrasive system to clean exterior limestone may not be appropriate to clean the interior limestone in the same building (I’ve seen that happen on a project in New York City), applying LEED-NC may be appropriate for one building on your site but maybe not another. Solar panels and wind turbines may not be appropriate for the roof of the tea house or mansion at Filoli, but they may be appropriate behind the greenhouse on that same site. Choosing the right green housekeeping practices and the appropriate sustainable design approaches must be balanced with your mission, your budget and historic preservation.
We have all been thrust into a new era that is both exciting and daunting. But we have the ability to make changes like we’ve never had before. We can stop climate change and we can do it with our choices. Denial is no longer an option. In the coming weeks you will read case studies in this blog that demonstrate how a variety of tools can be used at historic sites that meet the needs of those sites. These sites made choices and saw them through, with or without big funders to support them.
Museum Spaces
The parlor in Woodrow Wilson House, a National Trust Historic Site in Washington, DC. Would you clean this furniture with Pledge?
Cleaning and protecting our museum collections, interior finishes, objects and furnishings has long been one of the greenest practices in our culture. Would you see a curator cleaning a 200 year old wood inlaid table with Lemon Pledge? They’ve been using and promoting natural, Low VOC (volatile organic compounds), DIY (Do It Yourself) methods for a long time. And we can take some very smart lessons from them. We should continue all of these good, sound, common sense practices and extend them to all of our spaces, all of our buildings. And as you start looking at the type of products that are recommended by eco-labels like Green Seal and Greenguard, you will see that that is exactly what is being done in the marketplace and being hailed as “green.”
At National Trust historic sites, museum spaces do NOT comprise the largest collection of our spaces or our buildings. We are a preservation organization – some of our buildings are museums, but many have been adapted for office use or entertainment use or continue in their original uses which were not museums. So, if we extend the inherent “green” housekeeping practices we’ve been using in our museums along to our non-musuem buildings, we will be in really good shape. And if we evaluate all the practices we have begun instituting in our offices against our time-honored curatorial practices, we will probably find we can adopt alot of those for the museum space as well.
One basic question to ask yourself every time you think about picking up a product that you’re not sure of is – does it have a scent? It’s that “new car smell” phenomenon. We’ve been conditioned to believe that the “new car smell” or the “new carpet smell” is good, it represents something fresh and new. But it’s really the opposite – added, artificial scents in products typically mean that they have VOC’s which are bad for your health and bad for the environment. Just say no to the “new car smell.” When you have just painted a room or laid a new carpet, you should be able to walk in the room and smell nothing.
Heritage Landscapes
Topiary features in the historic gardens at Filoli in Woodside, CA.
Protecting and maintaining historic designed landscapes can be the most challenging of our site features in our new green world. Many of them defy all sound, “green” landscape and irrigation methods – they use non-native species, require enormous amounts of water and pruning, and may include topiary features. We are not suggesting you eliminate these important historic features or alter them. But we can suggest that you be smarter about your watering and irrigating techniques. Just implementing some basic changes like watering in the cooler parts of the day, not watering when it’s windy or raining (!), and creating a rain-collection/harvesting system can reduce your water use enormously.
(This blog posting is a section in my upcoming “Best Practices for the Care of Structures & Landscapes Manual”.)
