Early Hadid design soon to open up a new world of artMAXXI,acronym of Museum of the Arts of the 21thcentury, is a newlyestablished institution of the Italian Ministry of Culture: it willbecome the joint home of the MAXXI Arts and MAXXI Architecture andItaly’s first national museum solely dedicated to contemporary arts.Itwas 1998 when Zaha Hadid, out of 273 candidates, won the internationalcompetition to design the publicly funded, ambitious MAXXI.The concrete structure with glass roof will cover a surface of of30,000 sq m in the Flaminio District, on a site that was originallyoccupied by a car factory and subsequently by army barracks that wereturned into the first site of the museum.ZahaHadid explained the thinking process that lead to the currentdesign:”It was important to decide that we would keep some of thebuildings but not all of the buildings. And once that was decided wemade certain studies where the geometry which replaces the existing oneshould be octagonal, parallel, should be diagonal. What began to appearwas that a confluence of lines of many different geometries wasoperating on the site. What was initiated was the idea of a very fluidformal interpretation of the programme.” The way the spaceintersects and intertwines allows for curatorial decisions leading todifferent connections with exhibits and to create fields of multipleassociation and juxtaposition. Hadid’s proposal offers a quasi-urbanfield, a "world” to dive into rather than a building as a signatureobject. Long winding walls are a prominent feature of the newsite. In the architect’s words: ”the curving walls I designed are notonly on the interior to be exhibited on, but on the exterior too. Soyou can have murals, projections, installations: it is all about aninterior-exterior existence.”Notably the museum’s planning andconstruction spanned the ruling of three different Mayors and suffereda string of torturous stop and starts due to funding issues and, in2001, the sudden classification of Rome as a seismic area which lead toa considerable amount of replanning and rebudgeting. But alas the siteknown as the “eternal building site” is scheduled to close and themuseum will be opening its doors in 2009.
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