The art of engineering at the Louvre Abu Dhabi

In a museum filled with priceless exhibits, temperature and light control are essential. Yet in a building as complex as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, imposing the strictest of limits means performing a host of engineering gymnastics.

At the Louvre Abu Dhabi there are very few specialists whose work is required to be quite so behind-the-scenes as that of those in the mechanical, electrical and plumbing division (MEP).

On a building whose piece de resistance is the very poetic-sounding Rain of Light, their work will be measured not in aesthetic terms but by more mundane metrics, the most important of which is reliability.

Their task? To turn Jean Nouvel’s creation into a museum fit for the display of some of the world’s most priceless artworks.

After all, while Nouvel’s dome might capture the headlines, who would allow a Manet or a Picasso to be displayed in conditions where bright sunlight, heat or humidity might cause them to deteriorate?

“This type of building is new in the UAE,” says Sulaiman Rafeek the Turner Construction International MEP project manager for the museum.

“Other buildings cater for people but here the buildings are primarily geared towards the objects and those are far more demanding.

“Even back-of-house areas require environmental controls, temperature controls and daylight controls and that’s something very new here.”

The temperatures inside the galleries cannot deviate by more than one degree from 24 degrees centigrade and that has to be guaranteed, says Robert Ryan BuroHappold Engineering’s deputy director and head of MEP.

“The numbers may not sound tight and you may find them on other jobs,” the Englishman says, “but on other jobs if they go out of range, no one will be concerned because they are only satisfying human comfort.

“Here when we say plus or minus one degrees, we have to be certain that is what we will get.

“We have our own standards but we also have to comply with standards set out by Agence France-Museums, with international lending standards for the loan of artworks and with insurance requirements as well.”

The demands placed on the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s MEP systems are more than just a matter of creating environments that are suitable for its exhibits.

Thanks to the museum’s design, the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s power supply, lighting, air conditioning, emergency and computer systems have to be as flexible as possible – as well as invisible.

For Ryan’s colleague Neil Bennett, one of the most important factors that has determined the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s MEP design is its architectural complexity.

“This is a very non-repetitive building that has to work on a variety of levels,” the electrical engineer says. “It’s not like a tower or an office or even a hotel, which tend to repeat themselves from room to room and floor to floor. The galleries here might have the same envelope, but the shape, size and volume of each is different and that creates a real challenge when it comes to designing and installing services.

“Once you’ve done one you have to start all over again with the next.”

As Bennett points out, one of the main challenges inside the galleries is achieving appropriate light levels in rooms that will receive a combination of natural and artificial light.

“There are the things you would normally expect to see in a museum, artificial emergency lighting, maintenance lighting, and display lighting,” says the engineer, “but in addition to that, the architect has also designed the galleries with windows and roof lights.”

The light levels for each gallery are determined by the type of exhibits they contain and the amount of cumulative daylight each of these can receive.

“The artwork is allowed an average amount of daylight on it per year and this then equates to the allowed levels in the gallery but it also depends on the operational hours of the museum,” says the engineer, who has worked on the project since 2007.

“If the museum is open 10 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, then you can work out pretty exactly what the average light levels should be.”

To understand just how much shading and lighting each gallery requires, a team in BuroHappold’s New York office conducted a room-by-room analysis of the daylight penetration for each gallery, producing a series of reports that not only predicted anticipated daylight levels and the path of the sun but also took the sensitivity of specific artworks into account.

“Each gallery will be commissioned specifically for the artwork that is going inside it,” says Bennett.

“There are things like marble that won’t be affected by light so you can go into the gallery and the roof lights will remain open as long as there aren’t any issues related to heat.

“But in every window and roof light there are also three blinds – two diffusers and a blackout blind – and these will operate automatically depending on the time of day, the time of year and how much daylight is present.”

Two factors will determine the operation of these blinds: a computer model will provide a schedule based on the path of the sun and known lighting figures and sensors mounted near each window and roof light will also provide real-time data.

If light levels peak or become too high, they will trigger the blackout blinds to come down to protect the exhibits from any overexposure.

However, because the Louvre Abu Dhabi has galleries that will be filled with temporary exhibits on loan from museums in France, curators must have the freedom to be able to recommission these spaces if and when they want to change exhibits or move objects around.

“In the galleries, there is a requirement for a flexible installation so we have underfloor services that will allow the curators to plug in things like display cases,” Bennett says.

“These cases will have their own temperature and humidity controls and artificial lighting but all of these will be controlled by the museum’s building management system. There won’t be anyone going around at night turning all these on and off. It will all be done automatically.”

With its pristine walls and clean architectural volumes, one of the other main requirements is that the museum’s services should all appear as if from nowhere.

“If you look at the building, you wouldn’t want to see a plant room or heavy equipment up on the roof, not just from a visual point of view but from a noise point of view as well,” says Robert Ryan.

“There’s just nowhere on this project to put a plant like that because Ateliers Jean Nouvel [AJN] wanted to make all of the MEP services invisible.”

“This immediately posed a challenge because it meant we couldn’t use standard products,” explains Turner Construction International’s MEP man Rafeek. “So AJN developed special, non-standard products, such as special cove lights and very thin diffusers for the air conditioning but to verify their performance we had to make full-scale prototypes and to prove that they worked.

“This means that everything has had to be built especially for the museum.”

That testing not only involved the construction of a full-scale mock-up of a gallery in the laboratories of the Building Research Establishment institute in the UK but also the use of computer models that used computational fluid dynamics to predict the movement of air through the museum.

As Neil Bennett explains, the museum’s island-like, “in-the-round” design also leaves no room for any external back-of-house areas where the plant associated with MEP might normally be located.

“The idea is that the only thing you see is the museum, not the plant.

“AJN didn’t want to see substations, pop-ups or flues or anything like that. As you can imagine, that was a big challenge.”

To resolve that challenge the engineers and architects have devised a system where all of the equipment associated with the museum’s plant and services has been located underground in an energy centre and tunnels that service the museum.

It’s a solution that makes the Louvre Abu Dhabi the architectural antithesis of a building such as Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre, which turned the history of architecture inside out in 1977 by making a virtue out of its mechanical systems. Not only were they colour-coded – red for safety systems, yellow for electrical, blue ducts for climate control and green pipes for plumbing — but they were exposed and celebrated on the building’s external envelope.

While AJN’s desire for architectural discretion requires engineering gymnastics never attempted before in the UAE, the whole system would be irrelevant if it were not for the measures that have been taken to ensure continuity in the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s supply of electricity, water, cooling and essential services.

“It’s all about protecting the artwork,” Bennett says.

“When we first had the brief, the client wanted a very robust design. They didn’t want any single aspect of plant failure to affect any aspect of the artwork, not just in the galleries but in the art conservation building as well. So the most obvious thing we’ve done is to try and ensure we have 100 per cent redundancy for all critical MEP systems, which means having two of everything: two air handling units for each area, two pumps to serve the chilled water, we even have backup buildings.”

Ultimately, however, the museum falls back on a series of systems that will kick in if it enters what the MEP engineers describe as the “Domesday Scenario”.

“If a gallery or even the whole museum goes out of tolerance, say we lost all power to the site, then generators would kick in,” says Ryan. “Let’s say even that failed. That’s when we would use our ultimate backup, a special building that is entirely self-supporting where we could protect the artwork.”

If that sounds like a Hollywood fiction, the hope is that it will never be fully tested in real life.

nleech@thenational.ae