Artist, Nina Katchadourian: When it comes to dust in the museum, there’s a lot of expertise on how to remove it from the art. But what about the building itself? Where does dust enter, how does it move around, why does it settle where it does? Julio Vasquez, director of Building Operations, has superpowers when it comes to seeing and understanding this building’s airflow. Here’s what Julio had to say about the huge, open atrium above you.
Julio Vasquez: The atrium. It is a triple-height space, wide open up to the sixth floor of the museum. Typically in a air conditioning situation you like to have four walls, enclosed and here the challenge for us is all this air has to be maintained up six stories. Now, you have different activities happening on the different floors. Two different floors have food service activities. Others have open galleries. The first floor tends to be the dust magnet. And that’s because we have doors that open to the garden, we have doors that open in from the street. There’s a tremendous amount of people that are coming in. Twelve thousand people in one day, that’s a lot of air and a lot of skin, hair, and the like.
Nina Katchadourian: As he was talking, I pictured invisible weather systems invading the helpless museum with dust and contaminants.
Julio Vasquez: The challenge is, when you have all these penetrations, these openings, and this large stack, this chimney effect where air starts moving in, going up and swirling around, that really creates, uh, suction for the dust that’s out there.