Grass-covered roof at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Photo: Michiel van Iersel

The vertical garden on the wall of Caixa Forum in Madrid. Photo: Michiel van Iersel

It seems to be a trend among museums to use the construction of a new building to bring culture and nature closer together. Green buildings are cropping up all around the world. In June 2004, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid opened a five-story, 258,300-square-foot addition, with a grass-covered roof. Later this year Herzog & De Meuron’s cultural centre named Caixa Forum will open in another part of the Spanish capital, which includes a vertical Garden or “living wall” that was designed by the botanist Patrick Blanc.

Last year the French government opened the ethnographic Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, which is set in a luscious park (consisting of 15000 plants of 150 species from all continents) along the banks of the river Seine and also has a green facade (”le mur vegetal”) that protects it from the burning sun and the pollution from passing cars. At the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada a 500-square-foot vegetated wall holds plant materials, which are similar to those found on cliff faces, including wild flowers, mosses, and berries. And earlier this month Patrick Blanc completed yet another vertical garden, this time at the natural history museum (Le Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle) in Toulousse, which will reopen in December 2007.

P.S.: Last January the Art Newspaper already explained why it pays for museums to go green.

Luscious garden with 15000 plants at Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. Photo: Michiel van Iersel

After 30 years as director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s hard to imagine anyone except Philippe de Montebello in the job.

Unless, that is, Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn D. Lowry wants to fill it.

That could happen. If Lowry wants to step up from MoMA, the Met — arguably the leading art museum in the Western world — would be the place to go. First, of course, de Montebello would have to step down, and he has shown no signs of doing that.

“I’m not leaving,” de Montebello told me last week at a preview for “The Age of Rembrandt,” an exhibition opening tomorrow at the Met.

Sometime in the foreseeable future, though, the 71-year-old Met chief is expected to retire. And Lowry, 52, has emerged as a top name among possible successors that art-world insiders have been secretly batting about.

That is not great news, especially given the options.

Read full article (Bloomberg, September 17, 2007)

An exhibition designer with part of an installation by Christoph Büchel (Photo: New York Times)

When a museum behaves badly, it’s never pretty. But few examples top the depressing spectacle at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

I refer to Mass MoCA’s decision to exhibit “Training Ground for Democracy,” an immense but incomplete work of installation art, despite strenuous opposition from Christoph Büchel, the Swiss artist who conceived it and oversaw its construction until his relationship with the museum dissolved in acrimony early this year. By opening this show without his assent, the museum has broken faith with the artist, the public and art itself.

The legal principles at stake in this dispute will be argued on Friday when lawyers for the museum and Mr. Büchel face off in federal court in Springfield, Mass. Each side hopes for a summary judgment against the other.

Read full article (New York Times, September 17, 2007)

After a long standoff with the government of Peru, Yale University has agreed to return a large group of artifacts that were excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912 and that Peru contends were merely on loan and should have been returned long ago.

For several years Yale had argued that it had returned all borrowed objects in the 1920s, retaining only those to which it had full title. Yale proposed dividing possession of the artifacts. But negotiations between the university and the administration of President Alejandro Toledo, who was in power from 2001 until July 2006, broke down, and Peru threatened last year to go to court.

On Friday night Yale officials and a Peruvian delegation that traveled to New Haven signed a preliminary agreement that would return title to Peru of more than 350 artifacts — ceramics and metal and stone objects — that are considered to be of museum quality and several thousand fragments, bones and other objects considered to be primarily of interest to researchers.

Read full article (New York Times, September 17, 2007)