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..

2 Columbus Circle (on the right), day view (Photo: New York Times)

The 1964 Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle is being transformed into a new space for the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Almost everything about the building has changed, but the original “lollipop” columns persist. The New York Times has put an interactive feature online, providing an animated overview of the building’s redesign. Moreover, on the MAD-website you can watch a video of the construction works.

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) Floor plan: new vs. old situation (Photo: New York Times)

(Photo: Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Cooper, Robertson & Partners)

The New York Times is very positive about Renzo Piano’s computer renderings for the future downtown annex of the Whitney Museum: “The bold form expresses a level of experimental courage that he hasn’t shown in years. This is a building that could revive the Whitney, and inject welcome creative energy into the city’s cultural life.”

The architect seems to be very busy these days. After the opening of the LACMA earlier this year and the expected completion of the California Academy of Sciences this fall, the Witney Museum is only one of many large museum projects by the Italian maestro. On Tate Modern’s website you can hear and watch him talk about another highlight in his carreer, the 52-storey glass skyscraper housing the new headquarters of The New York Times.

Read more (New York Times, May 1 2008)
Go to website Whitney Museum of American Art

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

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 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).

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.

The Italian (graffiti-)artist Blu, specializing in murals and urban design like the one in Palestine that is shown above, has been commissioned by Tate Modern to create a wall drawing on the facade of the museum’s iconic turbine hall.

Tate Modern is to get a summer facelift, with a group of the world’s most acclaimed street artists being asked to produce work for the building’s Thames-side facade. The works, which will adorn the river-facing wall of the building, and will be created by six artists including Blu from Italy (Bologna), JR from France (Paris) and Sixeart from Spain (Barcelona).

The outdoor exhibition, entitled Street Art, will be displayed between May and August. Each artist will get an area of about 15×12 metres for their work.  This is the first time work has been commissioned for the building’s iconic external wall. In addition, visitors can also take part in an urban trail to discover street art near Tate Modern on the Street Art Walking Tour by picking up a street guide when they visit the museum.

Read more: BBC News | The Guardian | Londonist | Tate

A computer simulation of Saadiyat island in Abu Dhabi, where a new Guggenheim outpost will be part of a “cultural district.” (Photo: DPA/Spiegel Online)

In a recent SPIEGEL interview, the departing director of the New York- based Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krenz, talks frankly about the Guggenheim’s future outpost in Abu Dhabi. Calling it the “first museum for global contemporary art” and “a truly new step in the evolution of the art museum”, he even uses the term ‘pharaonic’ to describe the vast scale of the project. The exuberant design by Frank Gehry will occupy almost 42.000 square meters and will get a $781 million budget to acquire contemporary works of art.

After telling that the Guggenheim Foundation cannot afford the convenience, the luxury, of simply copying something we already have, he cofesses that by asking Frank Gehry once more to duplicate the ‘Bilbao-effect’, the museum could get into troubles: “It’s as if you, as a director, were shooting the action film ‘Die Hard’ and then ‘Die Hard II’. By the second or third time around, it becomes more difficult to surprise people.”

However, according to Krens the project is too important for Abu Dhabi, and for the Guggenheim Foundation to fail. He defends himself against the insinuations by the SPIEGEL journalist that the museum will merely become a tourist-hub and will be just another McGuggenheim-outlet by telling that he asked Frank Gehry to design a truly unique building with the breathtaking effect of the first cathedrals in medieval times. It remains to be seen whether this analogy will work in a Middle Eastern country.

Read the entire interview (Spiegel Online, March 27, 2008)
Read the latest news on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

PermMuseum XXI
Artforum reports that the PermMuseumXXI museum center has finally announced the winning architectural firms in the competition for a new building for Perm Art Gallery, a museum in Russia slated to focus on the twenty-first century.

Winning design by Bernaskoni (Source: ArchCenter / PermMuseum XXI)

 The architectural firms Bernaskoni (Russia) and Valerio Olgiati (Switzerland) are the joint winners of the design competition. Zaha Hadid, based in London, was awarded the third prize. It took the jury, led by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, two days to decide how to distribute 240.000 dollar prize money among the winners.

Serpentine Pavilion 2008
Frank Gehry’s plans for the Serpentine Gallery’s 2008 pavilion have been unveiled, reports Artdaily. Gehry said: “The pavilion is much like an amphitheater, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion, and debate.”

Model of Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008 designed by Frank Gehry © Gehry Partners LLP 2008 

The highly articulated structure – designed and engineered in collaboration with Arup – comprises large timber planks and multiple glass planes that soar and swoop at different angles to create a dramatic multi-dimensional space. The pavilion will be the architect’s first built structure in England and his first time collaborating with his son Samuel.