Designed by Zaha Hadid, Rome’s new National Museum of 21st Century Arts, or Maxxi (a play on the Roman numerals), was always intended to look timeless – an important quality for a building that has taken more than a decade to materialize. Hadid won the contract back in 1999, some four years before she was awarded the Pritzker Prize and, in a sense; this already feels like something from another age. Described by one critic as ‘unashamedly extravagant’, Maxxi is very much a pre-recession building.
Built on the site of the former Montello Barracks in Rome’s Flaminio district, the building is, in Hadid’s words, ‘a dense texture of interior and exterior spaces’ which creates ‘an intriguing mixture of permanent, temporary and commercial galleries’. From above, these resemble a complex junction of roads which overlap, intersect, and diverge. ‘Buildings… are intertwined and superimposed over one another,’ says Hadid. ‘This means that, through the organizational diagram, you could weave other programs into the whole idea of gallery spaces. You can make connections between architecture and art – the bridges can connect them and make them into one exhibition.’
The museum opened for an architectural preview in November, but the opening proper is scheduled for this spring. It will display the architectural archives of Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, Enrico Del Debbio and Pier Luigi Nervi, among others, and art by the likes of Anish Kapoor, Gerhard Richter and Francesco Clement.
