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Asked 50 museums their mistakes
Benchmarking 50 museums
They brought their architects and builder along, and the stories that came back were about what not to do. The teams described their loading docks, floor space given to entertainment instead of artworks, and sun that glared off glass and distracted from the art. The founders came home with 101 lessons and folded all of them into the architectural brief.
Mistakes anyway
They still made mistakes. The cafes came out far too loud because the acoustics had not been studied properly. The fix was expensive: perforated ceilings that are barely visible and take enough sound out of the room that people can hear each other over lunch.
The habit continues
The habit stuck. Mitch Rales has toured every stadium he has visited for an away game with the Washington Commanders, arriving at 10 and spending two hours asking what the staff does that works, what they would repeat, and what they missed. At Notre Dame last fall, with 50-yard-line seats waiting, he asked to see the freight elevator and how the trucks come in.
Why are museum cafes so loud?
Stone floors, glass walls, and hard ceilings reflect sound instead of absorbing it, so noise lingers in a room as reverberation. As a room gets louder, people raise their voices to be heard, which makes the room louder still. Psychologists call that automatic rise in volume the Lombard effect, after the French otolaryngologist Étienne Lombard, who described it in 1909. Acoustic engineers measure how long sound takes to fade in a room, and long decay times are the main reason speech blurs in large hard spaces.
How do perforated ceilings absorb sound?
Sound passes through the small holes into a cavity behind the panel, where it meets insulation or other porous material. The material turns sound energy into tiny amounts of heat through friction. The air trapped in each hole and cavity can also be tuned to absorb particular frequencies, an effect called Helmholtz resonance. From the room, the surface looks continuous because the holes are small and evenly spaced.
Why do galleries avoid direct sunlight on art?
Light fades pigments and weakens paper and textiles, and ultraviolet rays do the most damage. Conservators commonly recommend very low light levels for the most sensitive works, around 50 lux for watercolors and prints, which is far dimmer than a sunlit room. Many museums use skylights and diffusers to spread daylight evenly, which also keeps glare off glossy surfaces. Direct sun can also raise the temperature of a surface, adding heat stress to the damage.
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