Conference held on Analysis of Conditions at Facilities Handling Cultural Properties and Reduced Energy Use by Museums
A conference on Analysis of Conditions at Facilities Handling Cultural Properties and Reduced Energy Use by Museums was held on February 25, 2011 in the seminar hall of the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo. The current problem of global warming requires efforts to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases at every facility. Facilities like museums and art museums are no exception. Facilities like museums and art museums need to have reduced energy use while adequately maintaining conditions so that cultural properties can be safely passed on to later generations. At the conference, Professor John Grunewald of Dresden University of Technology, who oversees environmental analysis of projects to reduce energy use by buildings in Germany, gave a lecture on Techniques for Reduced Energy Use by and Analysis of Conditions in Buildings in Germany. Dr. Rudolf Plagge of Dresden University of Technology also gave a lecture on Methods of Measuring the Physical Properties of Building Materials in relation to Environmental Analysis. Dr. Plagge’s lecture cited the problem of deterioration of marble statuary along Berlin’s Unter den Linden Boulevard. In addition, Motoe Kanno, Akihiro Yagawa, and Akihiko Ohta of the Shimizu Corporation gave a lecture entitled Techniques for Airflow Simulation to Analyze Conditions at Facilities Handling Cultural Properties and Examples of Their Use. They described techniques for environmental analysis and they cited sample analyses performed during renovation of the Nezu Museum’s repository. There were 50 attendees in total, and an active exchange of opinions took place.