Museums, sustainability and wellbeing

To mark International Museum Day – and explore this year’s theme ‘Museums, Sustainability and Wellbeing’ - Foster + Partners is spotlighting a selection of its completed and ongoing museum projects across the world. From the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, which opened to the public in 1978, to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, which recently broke ground, the practice has developed a tailored and sustainable approach to museographic design.

Designing a museum is a careful balancing act, as these buildings often require an extremely high level of environmental control. For instance, artefacts are typically stored in spaces with low levels of light to provide stability of temperature and humidity for preservation. This conflicts with the architectural and human desire for natural daylight in the public areas of a museum building – including the galleries, lobbies and café, as well as the back of house areas where the museum’s employees work. Successful museum design must strike a balance between maintaining optimal conditions to preserve the exhibits and creating a comfortable environment for visitors.

Projects such as Narbo Via, a museum of Roman antiquities situated at the heart of Narbonne, and Datong Art Museum, China’s ‘Museum of the 21st Century,’ employ passive environmental design principles to maintain near constant internal temperatures. Narbo Via’s internal spaces are unified beneath a concrete roof canopy, which provides thermal mass and contributes to a comprehensive environmental strategy, while Datong’s high-level skylights aid orientation while minimising solar gain and ensuring the optimum environment for the works of art.

A number of the practice’s museum projects - such as the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Norton Museum of Art and the Great Court at the British Museum - involve retrofitting historic buildings, which is crucial for reducing embodied carbon content. These sensitive interventions also allow more people to use and appreciate the existing buildings and ensure that they are viable for future generations.

Foster + Partners endeavours to design museums that simultaneously provide educational and uplifting spaces for people of all ages, create optimal conditions for the preservation of artworks and artefacts, and incorporate sustainable principles to mitigate their environmental impact.

This selection of museum projects encapsulates the practice’s approach.

Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

The ongoing expansion and remodelling project will restore the existing 20^th century building, while creating a new public atrium and contemporary art galleries in a floating pavilion.

The design reorients the museum towards the city by creating a new pedestrian path across the museum from north to south. This path connects the original 1945 building, 1970s extension and a new visitors centre, while making the building more permeable at street level.

The use of cross ventilation, natural light as well as high thermal mass, solar energy and rainwater collection, reduce the environmental impact of the building. The new extension will be made using low carbon steel and features a roof that harnesses energy.

The museum held a ceremony to celebrate the start of construction in November 2022.

The Bilbao Fine Art Museum's new extension is a unique structure that rests respectfully across the existing museum, equipping it with 2,300 square-metres of new gallery spaces.

Natural light filters through a panoramic window offering expansive views over the adjacent green space.

Datong Art Museum, 2022

Datong Art Museum is one of four major new buildings within Datong New City’s cultural plaza. The centrepiece of the 32,000-square-metre venue is the Grand Gallery, a heroically scaled, top-lit exhibition space measuring 37 metres high and spanning almost 80 metres, in which artists are commissioned to create large-scale works of art.

The building’s efficient passive design responds to Datong’s climate - and a high-performance enclosure reduces energy use. The roof, which accounts for 70 per cent of the exposed surface area, is insulated to twice building code requirements and, with just 10 percent glazing, maintenance requirements are also minimised.

Externally, Datong Art Museum is conceived as an erupted landscape, with only the top of the roof visible at ground level. Like natural peaks, the roof is clad in earth-toned corroded steel.

The flexible Grand Gallery space at the heart of the museum, with high-level skylights, which minimise solar gain and ensure the optimum environment for the works of art.

Narbo Via, Narbonne, 2021

Raised atop a podium, Narbo Via provides a sense of restrained civic and architectural monumentality at the entrance to the city. The centrepiece of the museum is a ‘Lapidary Wall’, which forms a natural barrier at the heart of the building, separating the public galleries from the more private restoration spaces.

The majority of the services in the building are contained within a subterranean service void. Cool air is supplied at a low level and at low velocity, allowing a smaller volume of air to be conditioned, while maintaining a comfortable environment. The large spatial volumes formed by the high ceilings create a thermal flywheel effect that naturally pushes warm air upwards, where it is exhausted out.

Narbo Via's museum spaces are unified beneath a concrete roof canopy, which provides thermal mass and contributes to a comprehensive environmental strategy.

The centrepiece of the museum is a ‘Lapidary Wall’, which forms a natural barrier at the heart of the museum, separating the public galleries from the more private restoration spaces.

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, 2019

The Norton Museum of Art was built in 1941 as an elegant series of Art Deco inspired single storey pavilions around a central courtyard. Subsequent expansion broke the symmetry of the original arrangement. The practice’s masterplan restores the logic of Wyeth’s plan, reasserting the clarity of the main axis, balancing the different building heights and providing flexible, welcoming visitor facilities.

Retrofitting the museum’s existing buildings has significantly reduced the project’s embodied carbon content. The practice’s interventions breathe new life into the historic museum buildings, broadening their potential uses, while improving readability and the capacity to attract enthusiastic new users.

The landscaping of the Norton Museum of Art's gardens and central courtyard incorporates native trees and flowers to provide shaded walkways.

The retrofit project transforms the existing assemblage of buildings into a world-class cultural destination within a sub-tropical garden setting.

Great Court at the British Museum, London, 1999

The Great Court at the British Museum was the first of many museum projects, designed by Foster + Partners, with sustainable principles at their heart.

The practice took one of London’s long-lost spaces and reinvented it as a major new public square, sheltered beneath a glass canopy. The canopy’s unique geometry is designed to span the irregular gap between the drum of the Reading Room and the courtyard facades, and forms both the primary structure and the framing for the glazing.

The glazing system allows daylight to illuminate the courtyard and to enter the Reading Room and, in very controlled quantities, the surrounding galleries. To reduce solar heat gain the tinted glass panels are screen-printed with reflective dots over 56 percent of their surface – a technique known as ‘fritting.’ Together with the roof’s structure, the frits limit light penetration to only 30 percent of the roof area and prevent 70 percent of the sun’s heat – as infrared radiation – from entering the Great Court.

Natural ventilation is provided by high-level louvres positioned around the edge of the roof on the original Smirke structure. These louvres work in unison with a direct fresh-air feed to louvres at floor level, which allow internal heat gains to be vented through a natural stack effect.

The British Museum's Great Court is entered from the museum's principal level and connects all the surrounding galleries.

The glazed canopy is a fusion of state-of-the-art engineering and economy of form.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 1978

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts was the practice’s first cultural project, and one that embraced several themes that have remained at the core of its design approach – a strong belief in the integration of architecture and engineering, a commitment to low-energy, sustainable design, and a drive towards innovation. The building’s mechanical ventilation system, insulating external cladding and use of natural daylight made it a leading project in the move towards energy efficiency.

Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, all of the building’s functions are contained within the long and uncluttered space; a welcome departure from conventional gallery compositions in favour of an altogether more centralised and flexible programme.

The Sainsbury Centre's full-height windows at each end open the space up to the surrounding landscape.

Large enough to display the Sainsburys’ extraordinary collection, yet designed to be intimate and inviting, the main gallery – or ‘living area’ – evokes the spirit of the collection’s originally domestic setting.