It’s almost 30°C in Bilbao, Spain, but Juan Ignacio Vidarte made sure to turn down the air conditioning in his spacious white-walled office. A small eco-responsible gesture, because the director of the Guggenheim Museum wants to set an example for his teams and, beyond that, for other museums. To “green” the titanium vessel designed by Frank Gehry, it was decided to restrict energy consumption, to implement a responsible purchasing policy for the store, to reduce waste production, to favor rental rather than the manufacture of new crates for transporting works of art…
“The ecological transition has been one of our priorities since 2021”, he says. The irrigation device of the Puppy by Jeff Koons has also been redesigned. The huge plant sculpture made up of 40,000 plants, erected on the museum forecourt, has been given special treatment. “We can now control the volume of water required with sensors”, explains Juan Ignacio Vidarte. Some actions are already bearing fruit. The switch to LED lighting from 2018 has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 400 tonnes per year.
Three years ago, the flagship Spanish museum produced 4,300 tonnes of CO2, “the equivalent of the consumption of 150 families per year”, recalls Juan Ignacio Vidarte. In France too, museums repeat in chorus that the ecological transition is at the top of the pile of burning issues. Universcience, which brings together the Palais de la Découverte and the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, in Paris, makes it a point of honor to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. Symbolically, the public establishment, which has reduced its car fleet by half, prohibits its employees from air travel for any professional journey in Europe of less than six hours.
“Participatory approach”
The Palais de Tokyo, whose exhibitions often evoke ecological perils, would like to catch up: it has undertaken to reduce its consumption by at least 40% by 2030, and by 60% in 2050. But it it took until 2020 for the creation of a corporate social responsibility department. And it was not until 2022 that the Parisian art center, the largest in France and Europe with its 22,000 square meters, carried out its first assessment of greenhouse gas emissions, including results should be delivered in August.
Also in Paris, at the Musée d’Orsay, which gives pride of place to the first industrial revolution, it was a collective of agents who launched the train of sustainable development. On their initiative, a first action plan was launched in 2019. Mobilizing the museum’s teams, that’s the watchword. “We want to build a participatory approach, allowing everyone to get involved in driving change”insists Virginie Donzeaud, deputy general administrator of the museum.
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