Indoor Parameters of Museum Buildings for Guaranteeing Artworks Preservation and People’s Comfort: Compatibilities, Constraints, and Suggestions

Abstract

Since people tend to spend an increasing amount of time in museums, more accurate requirements are needed for the indoor environmental conditions of these confined spaces where two main requisites concur in defining their optimal indoor microclimate conditions: the needs for the ap-propriate artwork preservation and suitable levels of indoor comfort conditions for people visit-ing the exhibition buildings and/or working there. Unfortunately, human and artworks require-ments are sometimes characterized by different reference values of the environmental parameters that, not rarely, could become conflicting. Another important point to consider is that museums hosted by heritage buildings (particularly in Mediterranean climates, as is often the case in Italy) are often not equipped with climatization systems because of difficulty in installing generally bulky equipment such as HVAC system. This circumstance represents another important limit for achieving suitable conditions for the two requisites. In addition, the recent pandemic related oc-currences are pushing technicians and designers to rethinking the criteria for controlling the mi-croclimate of public buildings, and museums among them. In this paper this issue is addressed by reviewing current regulations, standards and handbooks (and by means of a real case example related to the Italian context), in order to ascertain whether such documentation could facilitate the development of effective rules/guidelines for a proper management of indoor parameters in museums.