Daylighting museum galleries: a review of performance criteria

Abstract

Conservation-based restrictions on light levels and cumulative exposure in museum galleries are now well established. These have resulted in restrictions on the use of daylight and prolonged development of systems to deliver and control its admittance. Attempts to control daylight and deliver fixed illuminance levels have proved difficult to sustain. Recent installations, in the 1980s and 1990s, have become reliant on a proportion of electric lighting during most opening hours and an acceptance of limited daylight variability within dosage recommendations. Given the difficulties in estimating and measuring dosage, most museums have limited data on their actual lighting performance, and guidance is sparse on how such targets can be met. This paper reviews the limited goals widely referred to in guidance to designers and presents typical data drawn from monitoring in the Frick Collection, New York. The balance between electric light and daylight is discussed in the context of an interior's daylit sensibility, and this provides the basis for a proposed widening of criteria for lighting performance in museum galleries.

Architectural lighting design: A research review over 50 years

“…CannonBrookes pointed out how difficult it was to gauge how well daylit galleries perform while meeting conservation standards. 69 A selection of galleries (including the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London) had developed technological solutions to maintaining a constant level of daylight illuminance on the vertical display surface. He suggested thatbecause meeting conservation targets does not guarantee good viewing conditions-the relationship between the two needed to be re-established and an annotated checklist of criteria (Table 1) was provided to assist in developing strategies for daylit galleries.…”

“…Controls strategies could be applied to museums and galleries as well. Cannon-Brookes 40 pointed out how difficult it was to gauge how well daylit galleries perform while meeting conservation standards. A selection of galleries (including the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London) had developed technological solutions to maintaining a constant level of daylight illuminance on the vertical display surface.…”

Interpreting Art with Light: Museum Lighting between Objectivity and Hyperrealism

“…Scientific literature concerning museum lighting frequently analyzes technical aspects such as the visibility of paintings, suitable luminaire arrangements, conservational issues, or correct color rendering (Cannon-Brookes 2000;Cuttle 1996;Rawson-Bottom and Harris 1958). The analyses partly reference the problem in that they analyze a single work of art or dissimilar artworks or sections of a painting or reference a specific painting technique or certain period, but a generalization with several artworks and differing painting techniques is usually not available in practice.…”