Islamic State militants ransacked Mosul’s central museum, destroying priceless artefacts that are thousands of years old, in the group’s latest rampage which threatens to upend millennia of coexistence in the Middle East.

The destruction of statues and artefacts that date from the Assyrian and Akkadian empires, revealed in a video published by Isis on Thursday, drew ire from the international community and condemnation by activists and minorities that have been attacked by the group. — theguardian.com

The Chinese government has promised to protect a rural mountain village that contains some of the country’s oldest temples and residences. [...]

Despite designating Banpo as a protected heritage site in 2007, the Jincheng city government nonetheless allowed the Shanxi Jincheng Anthracite Mining Group to displace the village later that year. [...] Nearly every building was destroyed and those that remained were left in ruins. — theartnewspaper.com

The US Army is looking to recruit the next generation of “Monuments Men and Women” to help preserve sites and cultural property in combat zones and to advise troops on heritage. [...] It is turning to museum directors, archaeologists and preservationists to fill these posts. [...]

With extremist groups such as Islamic State using the destruction of cultural heritage as a tool of war, such expertise is needed more than ever. — theartnewspaper.com

Through six decades of assault [...] the apartment building on Upper Pansodan endured, its graceful arches and colorful patios sacrificing little of their elegance and charm to the torments of time, nature, and repression.

Then in 2013, three years into Myanmar's unprecedented political and economic opening up, the building succumbed to a force that proved too great to resist: development. — news.nationalgeographic.com

Three sites in California — the Watts Towers, Noah Purifoy's Outdoor Desert Museum in Joshua Tree and the "Bay Lights" installation on the Oakland-Bay Bridge — have been named to a list of 11 "at-risk" sites by The Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington, D.C. [...]

"Landscapes often die quiet deaths when you're dealing with the elements," says foundation President Charles Birnbaum. — latimes.com

Unesco, which for too long has been silent on the growing environmental threat to Venice and its evident mismanagement, as revealed by the exposure of massive corruption in the construction of its flood barriers, has at last shown its teeth. At the meeting of its World Heritage Committee in Doha this June it passed important resolutions that show that it intends to call the Italian government to account and put Venice on its World Heritage at Risk list if it is not satisfied. — theartnewspaper.com

Through the free-flowing talent of Costa, Niemeyer, Burle Marx and Athos Bulcão, Brasília—the only city built in the 20th century that is listed by Unesco—has captivated the world since 1960. But the federal capital has not made Modernism sacred in the country as a whole and the protection of Modern architecture is still in its infancy. — theartnewspaper.com

Culture officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have ordered museums to put their most valuable pieces into storage, and some institutions have closed to the public, as fighting continues between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

Ukraine’s culture ministry has also asked that the media refrain from “emphasising objects of cultural heritage” to avoid their being targeted [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

The march of London's skyscrapers looks set to continue unchecked after the UN watchdog charged with protecting sites of international importance delayed a move to place parliament – which is being obscured by a rash of new towers – on its endangered heritage list.

Unesco was due to put Westminster on its List of World Heritage in Danger when it met recently in Doha, Qatar. — theguardian.com

While the civil war in Syria has killed tens of thousands of people, it has also destroyed countless of the country's ancient treasures. Now a number of Syrians are trying to save what artifacts they can -- and are risking their lives to do so. — spiegel.de

More than 50 leading figures from the worlds of art, film, fashion and architecture have signed a petition calling for a ban on giant cruise ships sailing through Venice. [...]

Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, the architect Norman Foster and his wife Elena also endorse the appeal which has been launched by the Association of the International Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

US museums are teaming up with the Syrian Interim Government’s Heritage Task Force to help protect Syrian museum collections and stem the loss of cultural heritage amid the country’s ongoing civil war.

Late last month, experts from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Pennsylvania Museum’s Penn Cultural Heritage Center quietly organised a three-day training session for curators, heritage experts and civilians in an undisclosed location outside of Syria. — theartnewspaper.com

Workers are digging the foundation for a twin-towered apartment building that will obscure the great flying buttresses and stained-glass windows of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

Preservationists, neighbors and architects are justly up in arms. [...] Even the developer laments how the approval process for new buildings in New York spews out too many projects that nobody really likes. — nytimes.com

Decades of socialism and military rule kept Myanmar — or Burma, as it was known — poor and isolated.

There was one upside, though. The economy was so lousy, there was no drive to demolish the big British colonial buildings in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, and replace them with the glass and steel towers that now define much of the skylines in East Asia.

[...] remarkable architectural heritage, which has come into the cross hairs of developers trying to cash in on rising land prices. — npr.org