VISIBLE CONSERVATION

On designing a conservation and science center where the public sees what the conservators choose to show

As project director at Barozzi Veiga, I was leading the team that had just started schematic design for the Grainger Center for Science and Conservation at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was then that we began our conversations with the lead conservators, to understand what they needed from the building and what they hoped it could become.

The message, repeated in different words by the head of the department and by the conservators in general, came down to this: We want to involve the public. We would like a gallery where we can show work of our choosing, and to be part of the museum. But we cannot feel observed. Our teams need privacy and optimal conditions for the work they do. We cannot give on this.

It came at an interesting moment. We had just started to develop what could be called the "Architecture of the Glimpse," a sequence of gallery-grade openings that would let visitors watch conservators at work through the labs' interior glazing. Similar contemporary projects had tried it, and it sounded like the smart way to go. On paper it was a clear win: it dismantled the old binary of museum design, in which the public sees only the finished object while the labor that makes preservation possible stays behind "Staff Only" doors. The owner's brief was explicit about wanting to reinvent that back-of-house model as a civic stage. But the way we were proposing to do it was not one the conservators could live with.

Those first conversations were when I understood, for the first time, that transparency in a building is never a neutral good. It is a cost, and it is the brief, and the people who will use the building, who decide who pays it.

The Argument for the Glimpse

The premise is worth restating, because I think it is still right. For decades, museum design treated conservation as something to be hidden, as if the labor of keeping art alive undermined the illusion of its permanence. The public experienced the artwork as an immortal object, the conservator treated it, correctly, as a mortal patient. That gap has always struck me as an architectural failure as much as a curatorial one. We built the wall, and then we built the "Staff Only" sign that keeps it closed. Our first idea was to dissolve that wall with glass. It was a good idea for a building and a poor one for the people who would work inside it.

What the Glimpse Would Have Cost

The fishbowl effect is real, and it would not have fallen on the institution. It would have fallen on individual conservators, who do close, exacting, often slow work, and who would have done it knowing that a stranger might be watching through glass at any moment.

We dropped the idea entirely. No windows into the labs, no vitrines from which the public could observe. Nobody at the museum defended total transparency, and I think that says something about how clear the conservators' brief was, and about how little it needed us to argue the point.

How We Learned to Listen

What replaced it came out of months of conversations, and I do not think it could have come out of anything else. We traveled to Chicago every month to see the conservators' current facilities, and we met every week. Specialist consultants in conservation facilities joined the team. They presented references and portfolios so we could see other examples, and the conservators in turn presented similar projects at other museums and institutions, so that we could understand what was compatible with their brief and what was not.

I learned an enormous amount, and it is hard to name all of it. How natural light and artificial light each serve the work, and where and of what kind. Why some benches need shelves at certain heights. The use and position of snorkels, the emergency measures such as eye wash stations, the requirements of fume hoods and of X-ray rooms. How the departments work with each other, and why the offices must connect to the labs. What each department does and what it needs, from paintings and objects to frames, conservation science, Asian paintings and time-based media. None of it was knowledge we had when we started.

A Gradient of Privacy

What the conservators wanted, and what we learned to design, was a gradient. Not of clean and dirty areas, which is a separate technical matter, but of privacy: from the gallery, to the central spine, to the offices, to the laboratories, which sit at the most private edges of the floor, nearest the facade.

[Figure: A gradient of privacy, schematic.]

The offices and support spaces sit between the corridor and the labs as a buffer. Circulation is separate. The messier workshops, such as carpentry and frames, are placed on the floor below. And natural light, which the conservators care about intensely, comes through skylights along the spine, sawtooth rooflights over the labs, and glazed doors.

There was a happy coincidence in this. The project has no new facades: it takes place inside an original building and structure, and a central spine made sense with the existing scheme of trusses. The sawtooth rooflights of the labs fit within that structure, running north to south, as do the skylights along the central corridor. It took very precise technical coordination, done through federated models from the whole team and engineers, and a model generated from an accurate scan of the existing building.

What the Glimpse Became

The Conservation in Action gallery is a gallery like any other, with the requirements of one. It shows works in treatment, tools, processes. What is different is who decides: the conservators choose what to display and plan the calendar of rotations, together with the museum's own exhibition designers, in-house. We designed it to be as flexible as possible, so it can take any kind of layout. There is a study room to one side and a full-height vitrine on the other, for objects, pigments and materials.

The visitor does not go any further. A pair of glass doors separates the gallery from the foyer, and through them the public can see the foyer and the corridor beyond, and the conservators who cross it carrying instruments and treatments between their offices and their labs. That is the glimpse, now. It is a glimpse of the building and of people moving through it, and not of the work itself. The conservators decide when to open up the work, and when not to.

What It Cost

Nobody lost much, and that is worth saying plainly. The conservators did not have to give up anything, because their brief was clear and detailed from the beginning. The museum gave up its main spaces on the floor, which had been public galleries and are now private, and handed them over to the conservators. We, the architects, gave up our ambition to open the labs to the public. Nothing else was lost, and there is nothing I regret.

The cost was time: time in conversation, and time finding the right place for the gallery, which ended up at the transition between the museum's other galleries and the conservation center.

The Seduction of Demystification

There is a version of this argument, the one I was making enthusiastically before those first conversations, that treats transparency as an unambiguous act of institutional honesty. Pull back the curtain, demystify the masterpiece, let the public see the frailty of the object under a microscope, and watch their relationship to the art deepen.

I still think that is often true. Visitors do connect more personally with a painting once they have seen the physical vulnerability being studied and treated. Other institutions have gone this way, with admirable results. The Lunder Conservation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which opened in 2006, was presented as the first permanent facility where the public can watch conservators work through floor-to-ceiling glass, and the Rijksmuseum has restored The Night Watch inside a glass chamber in its gallery.

But I have become more suspicious of how easily that argument slides into something else: transparency as spectacle, conservation as content. A viewing window is, among other things, a very good exhibit. It draws crowds. It photographs well. None of that is disqualifying, but it means the architecture has to keep asking, project after project, whether the visibility serves the institution's mission or its appeal as an attraction. Those two things pull in different directions more often than the initial pitch admits. I do not think every conservation department should be asked to work in public, and I am wary of a field-wide model that assumes they should.

What I'd Carry Into the Next One

The building has not yet opened, so I cannot say that it gets the balance right. What I can say is what we designed to get there: a gallery whose content belongs to the conservators, a gradient of privacy that they asked for and helped us draw, and a glimpse that is theirs to widen or narrow over time.

If I started again, I would listen first, without arriving with a scheme already complete or a proposal already made. Every project is different, and none should start from fixed assumptions. Study the brief closely. Talk at length with the people who will use the building and with the experts in the field, above all in projects as technical as this one, where we did not know at the outset what we did not know.

The beauty of a museum was never only in the objects on the wall. It is in the tireless work required to keep them intact for the next century. A glimpse of that work is worth designing, but only if the people doing it are the ones who decide how much to show.

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Alicia Hernanz is the founder of Anantu.Studio, an independent consultancy for museums and cultural institutions. She spent over a decade with leading European architecture practices, including five years working with Barozzi Veiga directing the design and delivery of a major expansion at the Art Institute of Chicago.