The Piazza Augusto Imperatore in Rome and its modern neighbor, the Ara Pacis Museum, at center, designed by Richard Meier. (Photo: Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times)

The International Herald Tribune has a remarkable story on Rome’s new mayor who recently announced his intention to tear down a museum designed by U.S. architect Richard Meier. He was referring to the so-called Ara Pacis museum that was built to house the Ara Pacis, a 2,000-year-old Roman altar, and opened its doors in the ancient centre of the Italian capital in 2006. Consisting of a glass, marble and steel rectangular shaped structure, the museum was praised by many as a welcome addition to Rome’s more traditional architecture.

But at a news conference, as he outlined his plans for Rome, mayor Gianni Alemanno threatened that: “Meier’s building is a construction to be scrapped”. Alemanno, who last week became the first right-wing politician elected Rome mayor since Mussolini’s time, is among those critics who thought the classical Ara Pacis should never have been housed in such a modern structure.

And he’s is in good company. around the time of the opening in 2006, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times wrote an almost hostile review of the building and its architect:

Mr. Meier’s building is a contemporary expression of what can happen when an architect fetishizes his own style out of a sense of self-aggrandizement. Absurdly overscale, it seems indifferent to the naked beauty of the dense and richly textured city around it.

And he even went as far as comparing Meier to Mussolini:

” While Mussolini’s architects can be faulted for trying to reshape the city’s history for their own propaganda aims — and to satisfy the egomaniacal drive of a despot — the museum reminds us that vanity is not unique to generals or politicians.”

Next year it will be exactly 100 years ago that Futurist leader Marinetti called for the destruction of the past as entombed in museums, and one century later his intellectual heirs in Italy might bring his words into action..

General staff building extension for the Hermitage, a former palace in St. Petersburg (Photo: OMA/AMO)

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA/AMO) will redesign the art displays inside St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum over the next six years to bring the landmark Russian institution up to date. In tandem with the Hermitage, Koolhaas will, in the first year, draw up a master plan for re-exhibiting the museum’s treasures. He will then change the displays in the Islamic and Chinese rooms, and use a section of the imperial general staff building as a contemporary art space.

No new structure will be put up, nor will any part of the existing architecture be modified. “The goal is not about going back to a previous condition, but perhaps creating a greater awareness of what was once there, or finding a way so the two can be present at the same time,” said Koolhaas in a recent interview. “I want to find another way to modernize the museum, to modernize the physical substance.”

OMA/AMO has been working as a consultant for the State Hermitage Museum for several years now. In 2003 OMA/AMO already proposed an extension project dealing not only with architecture but as well with the distribution of 3.5 million artifacts across 2,000 rooms. The next phase of the project will run to 2014, the Hermitage’s 250th anniversary. Financial backing will be provided by the Dutch government and the Moscow-based Mercury Group, which sells luxury goods. The architectural team will also organize four international seminars discussing central issues of the investigation, with leading specialists and cultural figures. The Hermitage 2014 Masterplan will culminate in a final international exhibition and publication.

Photo collage of an exhibition in the General Staff Building: “Does every museum need to be modernized”? “Might neglect be used ‘to expose value”? (Photo: OMA/AMO)

Read an interview with Rem Koolhaas (Bloomberg, January 30, 2008)
Read press release (Office for Metropolitan Architecture, January 25, 2008)
Go to website State Hermitage Museum
Go to website OMA/AMO

Federal agents raided the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Thursday as part of a five-year inquiry into smuggled relics. (Photo: Nick Ut/Associated Press)

“Federal agents raided a Los Angeles gallery and four museums in Southern California on Thursday, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as part of a five-year investigation into the smuggling of looted antiquities from Thailand, Myanmar, China and Native American sites.” (New York Times, January 25, 2008)

“They suspect the items were smuggled in from Thailand and China before being given to museums, allowing the donors to claim back tax. The scam involved smugglers putting “Made in Thailand” stickers on genuine antiques to get them through customs. The museums are co-operating but say they had no reason to be suspicious. No arrests have been made.” (BBC News, January 25, 2008)

A former curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum was acquitted Tuesday of conspiring to acquire an ancient funerary wreath that Greek officials say was illegally removed from Greece about 15 years ago, judicial officials said.

The former curator, Marion True, 59, was not present at the hearing. But the ruling, issued unanimously by the three-member criminal appeals court, followed a motion of dismissal that her lawyer, Yannis Yannides, submitted at the start of the trial last week, citing the statute of limitations.

“The rule of law was applied,” said Yannides. “That’s all we wanted. That’s all we asked for.”

True, who is also on trial in Italy for trafficking in artifacts, faced up to 10 years in prison.

Greece first laid claim to the 2,500-year-old crown in the mid-1990s, but its precise site of excavation was not established for years.

Read full article

On Saturday, huge cranes will begin lifting ancient statues, carvings and architectural fragments off the Acropolis, down to a new museum built at the base of the most famous citadel in the world. For the vast majority of these stone remnants of the great age of Athens, it will be the first time they have ever left this rocky summit.Even as the forces of history washed over this city for millennia, making and unmaking it according to the dictates of three major religions and at least a half-dozen empires, these stone gods and heroes, which once decorated its temples and public spaces, have remained close to their original home. That makes them the lucky ones.

The new museum, designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, has proved controversial from the start. The old Acropolis museum, a low and ugly space built next to the Parthenon, has long been deemed inadequate. Three earlier efforts to build a new museum, in 1976, 1979 and 1989, failed after becoming mired in legal, archaeological and political conflicts. The current museum, which required the expropriation of 25 buildings, has been in the works since 1997, and again legal difficulties delayed it — so much so that the plan to open in time for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics is now ancient history.

But Dimitrios Pandermalis, the president of the museum project, says the first visitors will be allowed in early next year, and the museum will have a grand opening sometime in early 2009. At which point, perhaps, arguments about the building will give way to the building’s basic argument. Which is simple: Greece wants the marble sculptures that the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, chiseled off the Parthenon more than 200 years ago. From the ground up, the building is designed to emphasize the Greek claim that the “Elgin marbles” should be returned to Athens, to join together in one place as much of the surviving Parthenon statuary as can be assembled.

Read full article (Washington Post, October 7, 2007)

Italy’s presidential palace will host an exhibit of 40 antiquities the J. Paul Getty Museum is returning as Rome reclaims treasures it says were looted from Italian territory, officials said Wednesday.

The exhibition at the Qurinale Palace will open at the end of December and last through February, the palace said in a statement. Entrance will be free.

“As the home of all Italians, the Qurinale is the most appropriate and prestigious place so that our citizens and visitors from around the world can come and admire these masterpieces in the country where they came from,” Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli said.

After more than a year of negotiations, the Los Angeles-based Getty museum agreed in August to return the 40 works Italy says were looted. The first four arrived in Rome on Tuesday.

The Getty has denied knowingly buying illegally obtained objects. Italy’s deal with the museum includes no admission of guilt.

Read full article (International Herald Tribune, October 3, 2007)

Photos of the exterior (left and center) and interior (right) of the Kunstmuseum für das Erzbistum in Cologne, Germany (photos: Helen Binet)

It appears to be a trend among museum architects to leave existing structures untouched while carefully adding new layers. There are few places where a history stretching back thousands of years is more legible than the site of the Gothic St. Kolumba church, destroyed in WWII, in the centre of Cologne. Archaeologists started excavating the area of rubble in the 1970s. Apart from the church ruins dating from around 1500 and the chapel of the “Madonna in the Ruins” which was built inside them by Gottfried Böhm in the 1950s, they have unearthed layers from the Late Medieval, Caroligian, Frankian and Roman periods. Now a contemporary layer is being added. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has built the new Art museum of the archbishopric of Cologne over the archaeological site, the Gothic ruins and Böhm’s chapel.

This report originally appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau on September 18, 2007.

In Madrid, the architectural duo Herzog and De Meuron are also adding new layers to an existing structure that will house a large cultural center, the so-called Caixa Forum. The architects, known for their award-winning Tate Modern design, are currently renovating a 21,500-square-foot disused coal-burning electrical station built in 1900. The design enables a quadrupling of the space by constructing two underground floors and topping the original building’s double-peaked warehouse structure with a large-scale austere addition. The new superstructure will be sheathed in shimmering, tinted iron, to contrast with the existing red brick facade.

New iron roof of the Caixa Forum in Madrid

A new Web game developed by a museum group encourages children to single out an exotic artifact — a stone sculpture of a Chinese sea monster, a decorated shield from the Solomon Islands, an African mask or a Hopi kachina doll — and then search for its geographic origin, gaining information about the object along the way.

In this free animated game, called Room of Wonders and meant for ages 6 to 12, intrepid young explorers go by car, boat, plane, balloon or camel as they seek out the antique while the game responds, orally and visually, by releasing amusing bits of information. (If you fail to find the object, you are returned to the start.)

Room of Wonders was developed under the auspices of the French Regional and American Museum Exchange, known as Frame, a coalition of 23 museums that exchange works of art, personnel, technology and resources. The game, stocked with objects from these museums, is at framemuseums.org.

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

Click here to launch the game

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The 3.2-million-year-old human-like fossil “Lucy” (Photo: BBC)

After 3.2 million years in East Africa, one of the world’s most famous sets of fossils was quietly flown out of Ethiopia overnight for a tour of the United States that some experts say is a dangerous gamble with an irreplaceable relic.

Although the fossil known as Lucy was expected to leave the Ethiopian Natural History Museum this month, some in the nation’s capital were surprised the departure took place under cover of darkness with no fanfare Sunday.

“This is a national treasure,” Kine Arega, a 29-year-old attorney in Addis Ababa, told The Associated Press. “How come the public has no inkling about this? It’s amazing that we didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

Read full article (International Herald Tribune, August 6, 2007)
Read BBC article (August 6, 2007)

Greek authorities began an investigation Tuesday into claims that nine Byzantine-era plates on display at three Greek museums were illegally smuggled out of Bulgaria.

The silver plates decorated with gold filigree date to the late 12th century, according to Greek experts. They measure between 26 and 33 centimeters, or 10 and 13 inches, in diameter.

Judicial authorities said the investigation into the Bulgarian claims was expected to last several months. The results will be forwarded to Bulgarian authorities.

The plates are on display at Thessaloniki’s Byzantine Heritage Museum, and Athens’ Benaki Museum and Byzantine and Christian Museum.

Read full article (International Herald Tribune, July 31, 2007)