No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
In commemoration of its bicentennial anniversary in 2010, the Museum fur Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History) in Berlin, the largest of its kind in Germany, reopened a wing that was bombed and ruined at the end of World War II. This was the first in a planned series of works to adapt the museum’s infrastructure to modern standards of collections care and energy efficiency. In the first phase, the ruined east wing of the museum was rebuilt as a high-security storage space. It was designed to meet safety requirements for storing the flammable fluid-preserved collection of zoological specimens in the context of a listed building and with the aim of optimal use of available space. This new facility now safely houses one million specimens preserved in 276,000 glass jars containing 80 tons of ethanol. The second phase of the construction programme is now in the advanced planning stage. In the first phase temperature control was implemented predominantly for safety reasons, however, in the next stage the environmental conditions are designed to (i) meet the requirements of the ‘dry’ collections which are to be re-housed in a dedicated collection hall; (ii) minimise energy consumption by using the building’s inertia and geothermal heating and cooling and (iii) optimise air exchange for both public and collection areas. This article aims to describe the new wet collection building. It presents how the various demands of building, safety and collections care were balanced and optimised, guided by the principle of ‘new meets old’. The paper also outlines the different approaches considered to adapt a historic museum building with a facade listed under monument protection to modern standards of collections care and energy efficiency.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.