I remember looking at Zaha Hadid’s drawings for Rome’s new museum of 21st-century arts a decade ago and wondering how on earth this structural adventure would ever be built. On paper, it looked like a surreal motorway intersection imagined by JG Ballard, or a wiring diagram plotted for the palace of esoteric giants. Her floor plans were some of the most mesmerizing and challenging since Frank Lloyd Wright unveiled his seemingly improbable designs for New York’s Guggenheim museum more than 50 years ago.
What was so radical about them? The walls of Hadid’s new museum, unveiled to the public this month, not only curve but change in depth as they do so. There are moments where walls become floors and even threaten to become ceilings, diving and curving like bobsleigh tracks. (When I went there last week, Hadid told me she wanted the building’s concrete curves to “unwind like a ribbon in space”.) All of this means that the gallery has been an enormous challenge to build.
It took Wright 15 years to realize the Guggenheim; it has taken Hadid 10 to complete Maxxi, as the museum is known (a play on the Roman numerals for 21st century). There have been at least six changes of national government in Italy since the project was first announced in 1998, from left to center to right, and the future of many such public projects has often seemed doubtful. But now here it stands, in the residential and military Flaminio district, almost exactly as Hadid and her team first imagined it.
Open to the public over the past two weekends as an architectural shell, the museum will launch fully next spring. Only then will it be possible to judge whether Maxxi, Hadid’s finest built work to date, is a real success. Just how will the museum’s curators make use of these extraordinary public spaces and gigantic galleries? What will go on show?
The truth is that although the museum, devoted to both architecture and art, has been busy collecting work by Anish Kapoor, Gerhard Richter, Francesco Clemente and many others (along with the archives of architects Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi and Pier Luigi Nervi), this light-filled labyrinth is dedicated to the future. There is no great hurry to fill it, after all: there is the rest of the 21st century to go before the museum can be called complete.
Perhaps this is why Hadid has chosen to make Maxxi an almost modest, if not quite self-effacing, building from the outside. She says she hopes it will be fashion-proof. As you approach, it is only the big flags emblazoned with the name Maxxi that guarantee you have come to the right place. Instead, Hadid has reserved her architectural firepower for the interior.
The huge entrance lobby sets the tone, punching up through the height of the building and offering views into what appear to be ineffable depths. This is a museum of just a few heroic galleries, but with a variety of ways of reaching them. Daylight is ever-present; this can be blacked out if need be for exhibition purposes, though the sun is always held at bay, with light filtered through a two-tier system of roof-mounted louvers and screens. Artificial lighting is concealed wherever possible. If curators wish to divide the galleries, floating walls can be hung from the dark concrete ribs snaking throughout the building; these can also support sculpture weighing up to a tonne. The gallery’s project architect, Gianluca Racana, says: “We didn’t want anything — air-conditioning grilles or light fittings — to take away from the raw power of the spaces we’ve created, or from the art that will be on show.”
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