It remained a bit unclear how seriously the suggestion that Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, just made at the “Long Night of the Museums” was: He hopes that next winter “a lot of people will simply go to the Museums hibernate”. Turning the museums into warm rooms is likely to be difficult for security reasons alone. But Biesenbach seems to suspect that energy consumption could become a problem for the culture palaces, and not just because their electricity bills will increase. Running museums, opera houses and theatres, many of them in historical buildings, is energy-intensive. From the point of view of thermal insulation, for example, the New National Gallery, Mies van der Rohe’s cool temple of modernism with an all-glass facade, is sheer madness.
Electricity costs: An energy crisis is approaching museums and theaters – culture
