Life, Color, Energy at The Brooklyn Children's Museum

I rode my bike down to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum yesterday. It was a rainy fall day and the sounds of the city were damped by the white noise swoosh of tires on wet streets, and the grey light gathered the colors from buildings and signs into a single, deadened hue, and everyone seemed to wrap themselves up in the blanket of their own thoughts.

I was content on doing this, too, until I turned the corner onto St. Marks Avenue and the Museum blotted brightly onto the sepia world in front of me like yellow paint spilled on newsprint. Riding up to the entrance of the Museum, I felt like Dorothy in the scene in The Wizard of Oz, after the tornado, when she opens the door of her displaced house and finds herself in a world of color.

Inside, the Museum was swarming with the frenetic motion of children, and the collection of sounds captured the whole range of human emotion—inside this place, kids were confronting the world and reacting to it vocally with joy, surprise, fear, excitement, and despair.

Next to the ticket counter, one little boy stood under the Welcome sign, his face turned against the wall. He had apparently been notified that it was time to go home and was fighting it out, will versus fate. When fate presented itself physically in the form of his winter jacket, the little boy launched into a wail woeful and prolonged and barely broken by the half-hearted spanking delivered by his father.

Throughout the Museum, children were being frightened by praying mantises and puppets, repulsed by an obese Burmese Python, and thrilled by the exhilaration of indulged curiosities. If the building's exterior implies some wild promise of the wonders to be found within, I think-- judging by the expressions on these kids' faces-- that it delivers.

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum originally opened in 1899. In 2005 it underwent major renovations, becoming both literally yellow and figuratively green. When the building re-opened this fall, it boasted a number of green features. Motion and carbon dioxide sensors adjust lighting and ventilation to fit the current number of museum visitors, ensuring both clean air and energy-savings. Other green attributes of the museum include recycled materials, solar paneling, and waterless no-flush urinals (yuck?).

The feature that sets the Museum apart from most other green buildings in NYC, however, is the use of geothermal wells for heating and cooling. You may have heard of people harnessing geothermal energy in places where there is intense heat under the Earth’s surface. New York, of course, is nowhere near a volcano, so when we talk about using “geothermal” energy here, we’re talking about taking advantage of the relatively stable temperature of the ground below our feet.

Because the earth absorbs and releases heat from the sun much more slowly than the air, temperatures several feet below the Earth’s surface remain relatively constant, at around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, year-round. During the winter, warmth from underground can be used to heat the inside of buildings; during the summer, heat can be sunk back into the ground, thus keeping the inside of the building cool.

The geothermal system used at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum is called an open-loop system. An open-loop system works by removing water from underground, circulating it throughout the building (and through a mechanical heat pump, which we'll have to get into later), and then returning it to the ground below. Two wells-- one for uptake and one for return-- reach down to tap an aquifer, an underground region where water collects in the small spaces in rock.


Open-loop systems are nice because they retain a lot of heat energy, but they have some major problems. For example, water generally seeps into underground aquifers over a long period of time, like water through a drip coffee machine. If you attempted to pour all of the water into your coffee filter at once, rather than drop-by-drop, you would end up with a giant, pooling mess and no water at all making it’s way though the filter. The same thing happens often with open-loop geothermal systems, making them a somewhat risky investment.

More commonly, people invest in close-loop geothermal systems. Here, a metal coil filled with water or refrigerant runs underground, absorbs heat, and carries it into a heat pump in the building above.

As with all forms of newer, "cleaner" energies, we're likely to realize some very exciting possibilities, as well as some serious limitations, to geothermal energy in the years to come. In our exploration of this energy, it is my hope that we proceed like the kids at the Brooklyn Children's Museum-- with tireless, joyful curiosity guided by a respectful caution for the vast unknown.

Photo credits:
Brooklyn Museum: Chuck Choi
Fantasia With Children: Bruce Cotler