The Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports that Lehman Brothers has won permission to sell art worth a total of eight million dollars that once adorned office walls at the bankrupt investment bank. A bankruptcy court in New York approved a twenty-thousand-dollar payment to art dealers who will now release the art from warehouses and display it to potential buyers. Lehman filed for the largest bankruptcy in the US in September with liabilities of $613 billion and had asked the court to let it sell off the art “for the benefit of” creditors. “The art collection represents significant value to the debtors' estates,” Lehman said last month.

Judge James M. Peck permitted the payment in a short hearing at the US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan yesterday morning, not far from the Wall Street institutions that were convulsed by the Lehman collapse. Former Lehman chief executive Richard Fuld and his wife, Kathy, put twenty million dollars' worth of art up for sale at Christie's in New York recently.

In other news, the board of directors of the American Institute of Architects have selected Glenn Marcus Murcutt for the 2009 AIA Gold Medal for the depth of his work and the breadth of his influence, which echoes well beyond Australia, his place of practice. Murcutt is noted for his ecologically responsive and socially responsible modernist suburban and rural homes. He takes inspiration from Mies van der Rohe’s strict geometries, Alvar Aalto’s naturalistic modernist revisions, and the vernacular forms of his homeland and channels this design aesthetic into economical buildings that work in concert with and respond to the land, yet provide living environments that are expertly sheltered from the climate and topology of their sites. Murcutt will be honored with the presentation of the sixty-fifth AIA Gold Medal at the 2009 Accent on Architecture Gala in February in Washington, DC.