The spiderweb shaped Living Roof on top of California Academy of Sciences in bloom.

This fall, after eight years and almost half a billion dollars, architect Renzo Piano will complete the greenest museum ever built—the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park—housing its aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof.”

Long section of the museum design © Rpbw

Piano’s museum has made extensive use of technology in the service of the institution’s green mandate and promises to set a new standard for ‘green museums’. Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer writes about its genesis.

Overview © Rpbw

The Iraqi National Museum has reclaimed 701 artefacts that were stolen during looting in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The news was covered by media from around the world:

Stolen treasures returned to Iraq’s museum (People’s Daily Online, 29 Apr 2008)

Treasures returned to Iraq museum (Kazinform, 28 Apr 2008)

Stolen treasures returned to Iraq’s museum (Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Apr 2008)

Iraqi museum receives 701 artifacts stolen during looting (Aljazeera.com, 27 Apr 2008)

Treasures returned to Iraq museum (BBC, 27 Apr 2008)

Iraqi National Museum receives 701 artifacts stolen in wake of Saddam Hussein’s ouster (International Herald Tribune, 27 Apr 2008)

Baghdad museum receives artifacts stolen from Iraq (Washington Post, 27 Apr 2008)

Read more Baghdad Museum news (The Baghdad Museum Project)

Tel Aviv’s new Bauhaus Museum is located in the White City, a collection of 1930s-era International Style buildings designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.

Tel Aviv’s “White City,” an unparalleled collection of 4,000 International Style buildings, now has a Bauhaus Museum to display Bauhaus-designed furnishings and related objects. The museum is appropriately located, in an International Style building. The first exhibition, which opened April 25, includes original furniture, graphics, lamps, and glass and ceramic ware, by Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Christian Bell, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, and others.

It was because of the “White City” that Tel Aviv was added to the list of 56 historical cities in the world in 2003, and became one of the few modern cities to be declared a world heritage site by UNESCO. The maverick architects and designers of the city could not have imagined that their application of the revolutionary Bauhaus style of architecture would eventually make Tel Aviv the largest open-air Bauhaus museum in the world.

It appears that the Bauhaus Museum in Tel Aviv has no website of its own, but the City of Tel Aviv-Jaffa maintains a website with a lot of good information and photos. Moreover, there is currently an exhibition on view about the White City, at the Architekturzentrum Wien (Austria). Read more about the museum on the website of Architectural Record.

The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam has just released its collection widget 3.0. Web Man Peter Gorgels alerted me of their new application, and we are more than happy to show you the fully functional Rijkswidget 3.0.

It is an interesting and clever feature that shows a daily piece of the vast collection of the Rijksmuseum. The widget can be embedded in blogs, Hyves, Facebook and MySpace. It is elegantly designed, and can be blown up; however it would have been nice if you could flip endlessly through the collections, instead of having to wait for tomorrow. Maybe an idea for 4.0?

Update:
This is actually the small version, to be placed in sidebars. This is what we will do for a month, to see how it works. Let us know what you think of this initiative of our friends at the Rijksmuseum.

Here is a blatant quote from Mike Ellis‘ electronicmuseum.org.uk, but since he has such a simple and straightforward conclusion of MW2008 I wanted to copy it entirely.

Ellis just spent 7 years working as Head of Web for the National Museum of Science and Industry, UK, which comprises the Science Museum in London, Media Museum in Bradford and Railway Museum in York. He now calls himself a «Solutions Architect», working for the Professional Services Group at Eduserv.

Please visit his site, he is an authority on many things, and might even come from the future.

This is Mike’s «direction of travel gut feel for what actually went on during the week:

• We’re doing some very cool stuff using some great new approaches and technologies.
• We’re starting to see the benefits of open access to our content, both in terms of Creative Commons and programmatic access via API’s or syndication.
• We’re - at last - worrying less and doing more.
• We’re beginning to see the benefits of community, not just the coolness.
• Finally: we’re up for collaborating and sharing in more open and positive ways than ever before.»

The keynote speaker of last week’s Museums and the Web in Montreal Michael Geist is looking back at the conference with a critical article in the Toronto Star. In short, Geist summons Canada’s museums to remove fees and contractual barriers to Canadian heritage.

«The dozens of presentations at the conference highlighted the remarkable transformation in how museums display their collections and interact with the public.»

He goes on to say that «(m)any museums are using online video, social networks and interactive multimedia to pull content from diverse places to create «virtual museums.» So, the museum community has emerged as a leading voice for the development of legal frameworks to facilitate digitization and avoid restrictions that could hamper cultural innovation.»

Yet, according to Geist, who holds the Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa faculty of law, «some fear the advocacy and actions of museums in embracing the Internet are not consistent, particularly in their policies on works for which copyright has expired.»

According to documents obtained by Geist under the Access to Information Act, the National Gallery of Canada appears to be treating public-domain works as a profit centre.

«(T)he gallery often added hundreds of dollars to the total cost of fulfilling a request, despite the fact that the images were in the public domain. In fact, the permission costs for such works were actually higher than those for works still subject to copyright. The gallery reasoned that the copyright holder would apply additional charges.»

Read his full article (Toronto Star, April 15, 2008)
Visit Michael Geist’s homepage

The Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing will include museum gardens and plantings that will increase green space on the city block by 21,075 square feet.

Forget Corinthian columns: Today’s museums have features like green roofs – such as on the new wing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Chicago – or goats as part of the maintenance team, as at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the first facility in the US to qualify for LEED certification on an existing building.

“I cannot count the number of institutions that are doing serious green stuff. That’s how huge it is,” says Sarah Brophy, coauthor of “The Green Museum,” to be published later this spring. “[Green measures] are going to become as natural and automatic as full accessibility and inclusivity,” Brophy says. “Within a year, the public is going to be asking all museums about their environmentally sustainable behavior. They’re going to want to see evidence. That will push all museums. There’s a pretty substantial learning curve, but the entire population is going to be going through it, and museums will be part of that group.”

Read article (the Christian Science Monitor. April 9, 2008)
Read about museums that are ‘going green’
Read an extensive case study of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, dubbed “The Temple of Green” (GreenSource).

The final day of the conference is on its way. This morning we had quite a rewarding demonstration of the n8 strategy, explaining our on and off line activities. It is interesting to see so many institutions working with all these interesting and intelligent tools, but not many working collectively in a city or region, like we do in Amsterdam. I would be keen to learn from other organisations that develop plans together. The collective of over 40 museums in Amsterdam have founded the n8 as an innovation platform for youth marketing, event organisation and new media development. Our annual Museum Night is by far the most known of the projects we do, but the Museum in MP3 portal is getting some good feedback, amongst others from the kind people at MoMA and ICA Boston. I would love to discuss this more in depth with attendees of MW2008.

Day two of MW2008 began at 8 am this morning, with the ‘Birds of a Feather’ breakfast. Our self-created table ‘Enhanced Museum Events’ inspired an interesting dialogue with Jonathan Bowen, who is presenting Wiki Software and Facilities for Museums in the midday session. Before that, I visited talks about Web 2.0 Metrics by the ever enthusing Seb Chan, and Web 2.0 tools by David Greenfield from the Loyola Marymount Universit.

The afternoon schedule brings a much anticipated and needed discussion on openness, by ’solutions architect’ Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly. Hopefully there will be time for lunch and more in-between-the-lines-discussions about the Semantic Web, public-private-ventures and enhancing actual museum visits by means of ultranew media.

Due to rather unfortunate circumstances I have not been able to send in my paper to MW2008; however the organisation has been kind enough to give us a slot at the demonstrations on Saturday. If you are interested to hear about the Amsterdam Museum Night, physical museum events and interactive media, social networking in the context of a museum festival and other ‘interreality’ examples, join us tomorrow at 9.30 am at booth 16.

Although the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum exhibited works of great artists, its contract with hotel resort the Venetian in Las Vegas won’t be renewed. (Photo: Las Vegas Sun)

The Las Vegas Sun reports on the announcement by Guggenheim officials that the museum foundation will close down its Guggenheim Hermitage branch in the Venetian, a large scale hotel and casino in the world’s gambling capital Las Vegas. The Guggenheim opened two Las Vegas museums, designed by Rem Koolhaas, in October 2001. The Guggenheim Hermitage, a partnership between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the smaller of the two.

The museum’s official statement emphasizes the predetermined life-span of seven year for the project, and that number has been reached. Critics argue that the museum simply failed in terms of visitor numbers and commercial successes and therefore had to be closed. They blaim it on a combination of uninspiring, second-rate exhibitions, and the the fact that the nonprofit museum was housed in the for-profit hotel-casino which made it difficult to raise extra money within the local (business) community.

The Guggenheim’s (overseas) expansion plans have been hit hard in recent years. The Bilbao museum changed the face of museums, but grand plans to create a brand as distinctive as Coca-Cola - to put a Guggenheim everywhere from Mexico to Taiwan - proved too ambitious. The 63,700-square-foot Guggenheim Las Vegas closed its doors 15 months after its opening in 2001 because of lack of funds and low attendance. Its only show was “The Art of the Motorcycle.” Back in 2005 the British newspaper the Guardian already reported on the epic rise and (predicted) fall of the Guggenheim empire and its flamboyant director under the telling title ‘Is this the end of the Guggenheim dream?’. Notwithstanding all the troubles the Guggenheim is experiencing, plans for a large museum project in Abu Dhabi will be pressed forward as Thomas Krenz vividly described in a recent interview.