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..

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

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.

The 12th edition of the annual Museums and the Web conference has started today. Keynote speaker Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law, had an interesting talk at the opening plenary, stressing the need for museums to take responsibility for shaping the future Web.

Like every year, the conference is as cluttered and complex as the topics it addresses. Chairman and MW evangelist David Bearman admits it himself, advising visitors to ‘browse’ the lectures instead of fanatically trying to absorb all of its contents. This mornings’s program consists of sessions entitled ‘Personalisation’, ‘Engaging Museum Audiences’ and ‘Theoretical Frameworks’. After lunch, themes are a.o. ‘Mobile Computing’, User-Generated Content’ and ‘What to do with New Media Art?’.

MW2008

Both editors of MuseumLab are currently attending the Musee 2.0 symposium at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Speakers include (a.o.) Peter Weibel (director ZKM, Karlsruhe), John Stack (director, Tate Online, London) and Alain Depocas (director Fondation Daniel Langlois, Montreal). You can watch their presentations via a live feed on their website.

The Dutch State Mines are about to open up their archives. In collaboration with its former patron DSM the collection will be preserved in digital form for future generations. Thousands of pictures and editions of its historical newspapers will be made available online.According to the press release this is a result of a growing demand for information about the regional history in the province of Limburg. More information on this project on www.demijnen.nl (only in Dutch).

Museum director Amira Edan gives US Army Lt Col Kenneth Crawford, commander of the 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, a tour of the galleries. Photo: Sgt First Class Kap Kim, USA

Nearly five years after the museum was ransacked, two main galleries should go on view this month; funding has come from Italy.

The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad is due to reopen at the end of December, nearly five years after the looting. Italian officials assisting the Iraqis told The Art Newspaper that work on two main galleries has now been completed. “Barring any last minute security emergencies, the museum will reopen in December,” says Roberto Parapetti, of the Turin-based Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi.

The two galleries which are set to reopen, with Assyrian and Islamic antiquities, contain large and almost immovable objects. This means that the security risks are lower than with smaller items in glass cases. The rooms are on the ground floor, near the main entrance, and lie on either side of the central courtyard.

Read full article (The Art Newspaper, November 25, 2007)
The Iraq Museum
The Iraq Museum on Wikipedia
Read Iraq and ruin (Guardian, May 2, 2003)

Protests by Jewish groups ended plans for a rock concert scheduled for last Saturday at the site of a Nazi death camp in Belgrade, Serbia, The Associated Press reported. On Friday, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, issued a statement calling the planned performance “a heartless insult to the memory of the victims of the Nazis.” The organizers of the concert by the British band Kosheen attributed the cancellation to “pressure from foreign and domestic media.” The concert was to have been held at Staro Sajmiste, where 48,000 Jews, Serb leftists and Gypsies perished in the 1940s. The Long Play company, which organized the concert, said, “We hope that the big publicity created around the Staro Sajmiste site will be used for solving the problem of renovating the place.” Members of the dwindling Jewish population in Serbia say the camp needs to be saved from decades of neglect.

From the New York Times (November 5, 2007)

The website of the planning & development network Planetizen reports on the Temporary Museum of Permanent Change in Salt Lake City, a public participation project that looks to conceptualize the city and its changing character. Urban development, demolition, and redevelopment has been a century-long pattern in Salt Lake City, Utah. As the city again ventures into a massive redevelopment project, former planning director Stephen Goldsmith wants the community to take a new look at what this change means for the city. And he’s created a museum to help them do it.

Currently the museum has no specific address and projects move around, but those involved are looking to utilize the mile-and-a-half of construction walls that are lining the streets as a way to create connections between pedestrians and their changing city. They have been working with property owners to gain permission to build display windows along these construction walls, transforming the plain barriers into a kind of storefront façade. These display windows would be used to highlight some of the lesser-known resources that exist downtown.

Go to the website of the Temporary Museum of Permanent Change or read what others have to say about it:
Musée sans mur
KCPW radio interview with the museum curators
Virtual museum to document Salt Lake City’s evolving culture 
Museums amid mall projects?

David Chipperfield, architect, shows details of the restoration in the Niobiden Hall at the Richtfest, or topping-out ceremony, where the roof of the building is added, of the Neues Museum on the Museumsinsel in Berlin, on Sept. 21, 2007. (Photographer: Jose Giribas/Bloomberg)

The Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island was left to decay after suffering bomb damage in World War II. The British architect David Chipperfield is now rebuilding a part of Germany’s equivalent of the Louvre and is conserving everything that remained without replicating what was destroyed. He is filling in the gaps with a sparse, contemporary style and modern materials, a blend that has won both friends and foes. They want the museum to be restored as exactly as possible to its prewar state. Others hail the coexistence of historical evidence and modern aesthetics.

Read article (Bloomberg, September 28, 2007)
See plans for Museum Island in Berlin

The strategy of Chipperfield bears a close resemblance to Rem Koolhaas’ proposal back in 2004 to do almost nothing to the authentic decay of the General Staff building of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. ‘Is it possible to do “nothing” today?’ he asks. ‘Can we abstain from modernisation?’ And, he persists (with the vast Hermitage in mind, rich in objects but poor in resources), might there be a virtue in neglect? Might neglect be used ‘to expose value’?

Judging from the plans for the Neues Museum, no matter how controversial, the answer to this question is ‘yes’.

Images by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) for the Hermitage