Originally Published: 2009-11-29

Ten years in the making, Rome finally has MAXXI, the new National Museum of 21st Century Arts and the republic’s first museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art and architecture. Its first masterpiece may be the 150 million Euro building itself, which was designed by award-winning London architect Zaha Hadid, acclaimed internationally for her dramatic and sweeping architectural forms.
Early reviews of the building have been generally favourable.
New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has written that the new Rome museum has “sensual lines” that “seem to draw the energy of the city right up into its belly.”
Noting the ongoing challenge for architects to design within the rich historic fabric of The Eternal City and the danger of Rome itself to rely too much on its past, Ouroussoff suggests that Hadid has succeeded and that her building design “jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap. A generation of Romans can now walk out their front doors knowing that the conversation with the past is not so one-sided.”
A more lukewarm appraisal by a British critic likened the new MAXXI interior to a disorienting Escher painting, though also acknowledging that Hadid’s museum design is “a phantasmagoric landscape from a great artistic mind.”
The new museum exterior is primarily concrete and is meant to complement the surrounding Flaminio district buildings, but Hadid’s curving design lines are also intended to compel visitors to the site with architectural suggestions of movement and acceleration. Inside, natural light is plentiful, though controlled, and a dramatic black steel staircase is prominent. (It is perhaps this feature that drew the comparison to Escher.) The galleries are a series of alley-like spaces of varying lengths and the free flow of their design is reminiscent of other Hadid work, such as her design for Cincinnati’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art and a BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany.
The sculptural qualities of Hadid’s work have attracted other Italian clients as well. She’s designed a ferry terminal at Salerno, a train station in Napoli Afragola, and a modern art museum in Cagliari. Her next major Italian project will be a museum and performing arts centre in Reggio Calabria. Situated on the waterfront of the Straits of Messina, the new Hadid-designed cultural centre is scheduled to open in 2014.

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