With the Metropolitan Museum preparing to choose a successor to Philippe de Montebello, I've been re-reading Making the Mummies Dance, the jaunty — make that very jaunty — 1994 memoir by former Met director Thomas Hoving. Given that the Met recently formed a search committee, which has now picked a head hunting firm, I laughed when I got to one passage early in Hoving's book about the way they went about these things 40 years ago.

As we join the action, it's the summer of 1967. Hoving appears to be on the list of candidates for the top job. He's at lunch with Ted Rousseau, a Met curator acting as go-between for some pro-Hoving trustees. Hoving asks Rousseau to tell him who's on the Search Committee and how it works. Rousseau's reply:

He said the committee was "for show". The actual candidate would be chosen in camera, by [then-Met Board Chairman] Arthur Houghton and his inner circle. As Rousseau described it, the time honored custom was to form a committee of at least five members, no more than seven, so that there would be a ready quorum. No women were allowed. The chairman had to be in the president's pocket. It was ritual that "the entire world be searched." It was equally sacred that the committee spend at least as much time finding the new director as it had the last one. To be avoided at all costs was a candidate who might turn down the offer. Thus the question had to be popped very carefully. It was taboo to consider a bachelor, a homosexual, a foreigner or a woman.

Well I guess that would have ruled out K.D. Lang.

But seriously, we can be sure that at least some things have changed since then. The Search Committee now has a dozen members. And five of them are women.

A couple of developments in the world of big bad buildings.

Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Britain and sometime architecture commentator, is complaining again about the way London is shaping up. Charles' taste runs to the traditional, the nostalgic and anything by Leon Krier. The last time he got seriously involved in an architectural battle in London, in 1984, he called Richard Rogers' proposed addition to the National Gallery "a monstrous carbuncle". That helped get the Rogers proposal shelved in a favor of the much more deferential addition by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown that was eventually built.

It was Rogers — now Lord Rogers, Pritzker-prize winner and chief architectural adviser to the Mayor of London — whom Charles was after again last week when he gave a speech denouncing the concentration of new skyscrapers in "the City", the financial center where Norman Foster's Gherkin also rises. One of those is a still incomplete Rogers' building, 122 Leadenhall Street, that people are calling "the cheese grater" because of its tall wedge shape. Charles wants tall towers in London confined to the area around Cesar Pelli's Canary Wharf development. (A development that's surprisingly lively even after work, with a very happy pub crowd — this is after all the U.K. — and new restaurants along the riverbank.)

122 Leadenhall Street/ Richard Rogers/ © 2007 ROGERS STIRK HARBOUR + PARTNERS

Charles' attack on Rogers' new building — all 44 stories/737 feet of it — is completely misguided. The wedge design was chosen partly to preserve vital (and protected by law) sight lines from Fleet Street to St. Paul's Cathedral. Because of the tapering silhouette, it actually has a relatively small floor area for a building of its size.

But I would not be so quick to dismiss Charles' larger concerns about a concentration of tall buildings in the City, where several others are planned, and which is the same area where there's a precious archipelago of churches by Wren and Hawksmoor. Charles warns of a world in which they're dwarfed by a robot army of massive towers and he has a point. That world is not exactly upon us yet, but his intention is obviously to push London to rethink how it grants permissions to build in that part of town.

The irony here is that at least a few of the new towers being planned or built in London, which was stuffed with bad modern architecture in the post war era and beyond, are some of the most promising proposals the city has seen for years. But I'd hate to see the day when those Wren churches start looking like the little Greek Orthodox chapels you run across in Athens that are swallowed by massive modern garbage on all sides.

In related news — not even a year after the opening of Seattle's new sculpture park, a new 14 story condo is scheduled to go up just yards away. The developer says the Seattle Art Museum, which created the park, is crazy about his scheme. "This is a big love fest," he says. Is that the polite term for forced marriage? Via.