Making a green gallery
Because of the climate emergency, energy consumption is a key concern for museums and art galleries. Learn more about what sustainability can mean and design your own green gallery.
Design your own art gallery
Your challenge is to design your own sustainable art museum. You can propose changes to an existing museum or gallery or start from scratch. You’ll make decisions about green space, the efficient use of resources, and how to make the institution meaningful to the communities it serves.
Not sure about what really makes a gallery green? You can read a short summary of key considerations on this page. You’ll learn more about refurbishment, social sustainability, and more.
Getting started
Here are a few questions to get you started on the project:
- Are you starting with an existing gallery or proposing a new one?
- Does your location already have old buildings that could be reused?
- Is your museum near a park or other green space?
- Are there ways to include greenery around, inside, or on the building?
- Does your museum interact with animal life around it? Could you include environments that would make it more welcoming for your other 'visitors'?
- What kind of materials does your museum use? Are there ways to use more sustainable materials (i.e. switch concrete for timber) or reuse old materials?
- Does your gallery need a building? Could it exist in multiple locations by moving the gallery from place to place?
- How do you encourage visitors and museum employees to change their behaviours and make more sustainable choices?
Creating a green building often means taking a step back and thinking about how you can achieve more with what you already have. Even if you’ve decided to start from scratch, it’s worth thinking about how to incorporate the existing landscape into your plans.
Trees, flowers, and shrubbery around your museum can be good for both the environment and people. Plants help reduce air pollution, create habitats for animals, and reduce the heat generated by transport and industry. Green space is good for people too: it’s proven to benefit our mental health and reduce stress. This is why it’s important for public institutions like museums and galleries to include green space in their design.
When we expanded the RA campus, the courtyard between Burlington House and Burlington Gardens—a space for staff and students to eat lunch and play table tennis when it's warm—was landscaped to include trees and grass.
Is there space for more trees or even a small park around your gallery? Can you create new habitats for birds and insects on the roof or the façade of the building?
What a building is made of can have a huge impact on the environment. For example, making concrete, one of the most common building materials, uses large amounts of water and releases high levels of CO2. Because it involves cutting down trees, timber gets a bad rap, but it's actually much more environmentally friendly than concrete because it can be sustainably grown, produced, and transported.
When Níall McLaughlin RA was commissioned to design The Fishing Hut—a building that could store boats and function as a shelter for anglers—he used oak for the structure and cladding.
Which materials will your project use? Can you incorporate locally sourced or recycled materials in your project?
Museums and galleries are spaces that use a lot of energy and other resources. They need to create warm and hospitable environments for both visitors and staff and keep artworks in good condition. The latter often comes with strict requirements surrounding the temperature and humidity of a space, which can use a lot of energy.
Where does your gallery get its energy from? Does it come from sustainable sources? Is it possible to include green energy sources like solar panels or wind turbines in your design?
An architect or designer doesn’t always need to propose a physical structure to change things. It’s worth considering whether you need to build anything permanent at all to make your green gallery or museum.
Think about what you hope to achieve. Can you make more of an impact through festivals, markets, performances or community workshops?
Sometimes you can find opportunities where a gallery can actually become smaller and still be there for its community. Interventions like this can be much greener than any high-tech project.
Even the best building cannot be green without the cooperation of those who use it. When you’re proposing changes to the physical structure of the building, think about how people are going to use them. We've switched to a sustainable energy provider, have reduced single use plastics on site, and provide recycling bins for visitors and we're always exploring what more we can do.
How will you encourage them to make the best of these changes and promote more sustainable behaviours? You might make a simple change, such as providing recycling bins, or you might make a more complex change, like using lights and taps that save energy and water by turning themselves off.
Share your work
You can take as long as you like on this challenge, and you can respond in whatever way you would like to!
You could:
● Build a physical model to showcase the project
● Use collage to show how you would add to or change an existing building
● Work with a digital art programme to achieve a multimedia approach
● Make a mind map or diagram to show how you would change people’s habits
● Write or draw an illustrated plan for installations and events
There are so many options and there’s always something else you can do to improve things.
We would love to see what you’ve created! If you want to, you can share your responses with us by email
What does sustainability mean?
A green (or sustainable) building can mean a lot of different things. But ideally, green buildings follow sustainable principles throughout their life cycles. This means that the impact a building has on the planet and its people needs to be considered at every stage: planning, design, construction, use, maintenance, and any potential renovation or demolition.
Refurbishment is the process of adapting, cleaning, re-decorating and re-equipping a building. It can also include the introduction of elements that make a building more energy efficient and sustainable.
Refurbishment is often considered a sustainable practice because it uses the existing building. Instead of demolishing and restarting, refurbishment extends a building’s life cycle and minimises its impact on the planet.
When the RA reopened after an extensive building project led by Sir David Chipperfield RA, Burlington House and Burlington Gardens were linked for the the first time by the Weston Bridge.
Degrowth refers to the idea that society can reduce its impact on the environment by scaling back production and consumption. It recognises that there are benefits to sharing and cooperation that won't come from continued extraction or unmitigated growth. For architecture, degrowth means using on existing resources rather than building more and more.
Imagine how places would change if advertising billboards were replaced with art or public information, if empty buildings were put to use as community centres or housing, and if unused plots of land weren't used for new developments but rewilded or repurposed for community gardens.
Many goods, homes, and buildings use more energy than they need. Energy efficiency means using less energy to achieve the same goals, so that a product or building has a smaller impact on the environment.
A building's energy efficiency takes into account how much energy it wastes and how much it actually needs to use in order to meet the needs of the people who work inside or visit the building. Energy savings can be made by changing lightbulbs, installing double glazing, and insulating the building.
When thinking about energy efficiency, it’s crucial to consider where this energy comes from. Alternative renewable energy sources (i.e. solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric) have less of an impact on the environment than fossil fuels (i.e. coal, petroleum and diesel).
A building’s carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases it expels throughout its construction and lifespan. Buildings and the construction industry currently generate nearly 40% of annual CO2 emissions, so many architects are working on proposing ways to reduce this.
Carbon neutral buildings, where the emissions from construction and energy use are balanced by renewable energy and other climate-positive initiatives, are one alternative.
Sustainability is defined as being able to meet our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. It’s important to remember that this cannot be achieved by just thinking about the environment. After all, a community is also people, not just the places where they live.
Social sustainability combines the design of the physical realm with the design of the social world – alongside buildings, it creates networks for social support, systems for citizen engagement, and frameworks for social and cultural life. Cities and buildings need to be designed to allow citizens to connect with nature and live happy healthy lives.