It looks as if I have nature on the brain this week. First, my review of the new art and nature park in Indianapolis was published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (see here), and now comes another article, about public gardens.

Yes, my annual trip to area gardens, for the Weekend section of The New York Times, is in Friday’s paper: A Garden Crawl For Through the Garden State.

But this was not planned; it’s simply an accident of timing. 

And — alas — unlike “100 Acres – The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park,” the five parks/gardens I visited in New Jersey have no art. A few have generic statues or sculptures (the mass-produced kind), and the New Jersey Botanical Garden, in Ringwood, up north, comes incorporates in its design copies of a few sculptures here and there. They are labeled as “garden ornaments” in the guide.

Still, some of the gardens are lovely (the Cross Estate Gardens, one of them, is at left) and worth a visit.

On the other hand, compared to those I wrote about for the Times last June — five gardens in and around Philadelphia (which I posted about here) — the gardens of the Garden State fall short, I’m afraid. Nor do its gardens equal the five I wrote about in 2007, in the Hudson Valley (here). Good thing it’s not a competition.

How did we all miss this? It’s about museum food, which in patrons’ eyes is often as important as the parking lot.

On Monday, according to Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art booted out Restaurant Associates as operator of its restaurants and chose instead to hire Stephen Starr, a hometown restaurateur. What’s interesting is that Starr said his food would reflect the museum’s exhibitions. He has not chosen an overall theme for the restaurants, one in the main museum and one in the Perelman building across the street.

The existing restaurants, which RA has operated for 16 years, will close on Aug. 1 for renovations.

The themed food will begin with the Late Renoir exhibit, which runs only through Sept. 6.

During the closure, Starr will be working on “the development of an exciting new concept for dining. Plans for the Museum Restaurant will be unveiled in the months ahead,” the press release says.

Starr has a dozen restaurants, with varying appearances and menus; he’s won several awards. But he has a challenge ahead. On the exhibition docket in Philly are shows on Renaissance Italian wedding chests, English embroidery (above), Yokahama prints (right), and North African jewelry.

RA runs many institutional restaurants, including those of the Metropolitan Museum, the Morgan and the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston.

Unquestionably museums are putting more stress on their restaurants lately, with the Guggenheim opening The Wright, the Whitney abandoning Sarabeth’s for Danny Meyer’s group, etc. — even if they don’t make money on them, and I’m told they don’t.

So, as Philadelphia has decided, let’s use restaurants instead to reinforce the attraction of art. If it can be done… We await the menus from Starr.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Indianapolis Museum of Art sits a good couple of miles from downtown, and while that may often work against it, not now: As you may know, the IMA opened its version of a sculpture park on Sunday — and I think the IMA is lucky to have such a large, wonderful site adjacent to the museum.

I was there last week, when the final touches were being made, after days and days of rain — well, that part wasn’t lucky. It was very muddy in parts, making the final days tricky.

I reviewed the park — officially known as “100 Acres – The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park” — for The Wall Street Journal, and it’s in today’s paper (here).

To recap, briefly, instead of buying monumental sculptures by names, the IMA under the curator in charge, Lisa Freiman, commissioned eight temporary pieces by emerging or mid-career artists and asked them to make “site-responsive” works. She chose well. I didn’t like one of the pieces, and I’m lukewarm about two others, but I respect the works that each artist turned out. They are thoughtful responses to the challenge given.

And there’ll be a new one each year: 100 Acres cost about $10 million to build (including a visitors center that I did not have room to comment in the review — but which looked to be, while unfinished at the time, well-suited to the park) and has a $15 million operations and art endowment (the final few millions are yet to be raised).

As I concluded in the review:

[The IMA] did well to devise a different kind of sculpture park, a relief from the tried-and true; a model in its way–but also, perhaps, sui generis.

I wish that weren’t so, and maybe more museums have more land than I realize. Creativity could abound.  

It was just about a year ago that I wrote here about an vandalism incident at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome: a protestor threw paint and left toilet-paper rolls at Richard Meier’s travesty of a building, which does not suit its cultural surroundings. (If, as I was saying yesterday, Charles Birnbaum and his colleagues at The Cultural Landscape Foundation are worried about the lost of great landscapes, I’d hope they’d oppose Meier’s building, too.)

With help from the New York office of Corriere della Serra, I’ve learned that Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno (center), who’d first promised to demolish the building, then promised to get it fixed, is doing just that. This spring, Allemanno has gotten agreement from Meier to modify the area, drastically reducing the height of the wall between an open-air plaza and the museum, which houses the 2,000-year-old altar, and a heavily trafficked road along the Tiber river.

For its part, Rome will construct a wide pedestrian area along the river, from the museum down to the bank, and rebuild the road in a tunnel underneath it.

Meier (at left, above, closest to the offending wall) is going along with the plan because of that tunnel. He said his wall was meant to block out the noise and sight of road traffic. His critics complained that the wall obstructed the view of the facades of two churches, San Rocco all’Augusteo and San Girolamo degli Schiavoni.

The plan doesn’t deal with the design of the museum itself, but there’s little one can do about that except to tear it down and start over.

Meantime, the road-relocation/plaza project will cost 20 million euros, and Rome hasn’t yet said how that will be financed. It’s set to be done by 2013, not a minute too soon.

If you can read Italian, Corriere della Serra has two articles (here and here).

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corriere della Serra

 

Here’s another reason to question the explosion in museum expansions over the last few decades: Along with the sins they’ve committed in building architecture that isn’t well-suited to the display of art and the high costs they forgot to account for, etc., museums have shown a distinct lack of sensitivity to the landscape. 

Charles Birnbaum, who founded The Cultural Landscape Foundation about a dozen years ago, levels the charges — citing, in particular, the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis, the Denver Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Tampa Museum of Art. He also worries about the plans of the Kimbell Art Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Museum of Fine Art-Boston (a historic view at left).

Birnbaum starts his comments, which were published in The Architect’s Newspaper and on his TCLF blog, with a softball, calling the recent slowdown in expansions an “opportunity:”

one that would result in built work in which curatorial values previously placed solely on architecture and collections would be extended to include landscape, and both the physical and historical context for the museum would be given weight in planning and design decision making.

But he then chronicles several mistakes, and says:

Collectively, these examples raise questions about the management polices at these institutions and the challenge to extend stewardship practices beyond art and architecture to include landscape. 

The Kimbell provides a good example:

The press release for the Kimbell project characterizes Piano’s addition as a “dialogue with Louis Kahn,” an idea echoed by The New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in his May 27 article “Two Architects Have a Meeting of Minds at a Texas Museum”: Ouroussoff wrote that Piano’s addition is set 90 feet to the west of Kahn’s building in an area that is “currently a vast lawn dotted with trees.”

Not mentioned in the press materials or that article is the dialogue Kahn had with his patron about that “vast lawn dotted with trees.” In a June 1969 letter to Mrs. Kimbell, he wrote: “the west lawn gives the building perspective.” Accompanying the letter was a sketch of the project with portions labeled “MUSEUM” and “ENTRANCE OF THE TREES” in bold-faced caps.

The Gardner, MFA (contemporary view above), and the Boston Globe come in for similar criticism.

Well, we can’t preserve everything or nothing would ever get built. But in many cases there’s something to be said for Birnbaum’s view.

Photo Credits: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, via the TCLF blog