Artist, Nina Katchadourian: Almost three million visitors a year enter this lobby. And when we enter the museum we bring with us skin flakes, clothing fibers, pollen, pollution, and other matter—a lot of dust gets free admission to MoMA when we come in.
For the good of the art, MoMA has to get it out of the air. Under the floor where you are standing now are enormous air handling units: roaring, breathing silver boxes each the size of a small room, which I went to see with Nelson Nieves from Building Operations.
Nelson Nieves: So the room that we’re entering right now is one of our mechanical rooms, which is directly below the lobby floor. In this room, we have approximately five giant air handling units. Our air is pulled in from the outside, it’s treated, and when I say treated, sent through multiple layers of filtration before being sent into the galleries. No matter what the temperature is outside or the conditions, the air in the gallery needs to be maintained at seventy degrees with a relative humidity of fifty percent.
Nina Katchadourian: Seventy degrees and fifty percent humidity is MoMA’s holy grail for air. And it’s critical that this is fail safe. So in the basement there is also a huge emergency generator, in case the museum loses power, to keep the art comfortable no matter what.
Nelson Nieves: Right now we’re standing next to the emergency generator. It’s equivalent to what you would put on a ship. It keeps certain air conditioning systems active for a duration of time, so that we are able to then bring all of our artwork into one room and keep it climate controlled during an emergency.