Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome {with Burkhard Morass}

SENSUOUS TERRITORIES

With the complexity given by the introduction of a Contemporary Art Gallery in an ancien mixed industrial building, the project is an opportunity to transgress an univalent attitude of an integration into a historical context. Moreover the Roman historical context is a challenge for this type of intervention.
Inserted into the complexity of an ancient industrial estate and confronted to a historical patrimony, the new Gallery is resonating to the existing static condition of the site with dynamism, movement and evidence.

SECTION

In the architectural work the section reveals the non-visible. In the Gallery the section is shown through the translation from horizontal to vertical, from inside to outside, from the foyer to the roof-landscape-garden.

SEQUENCES

The old and the new, the exhibition spaces and the other activities connected with it are at the same time articulated and specifically distincts. In the system of transition in which the new contaminates all around, every part wins a complex clarity and becomes attractive. The sequential discovery becomes event.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM

To find the point of rupture, to put in tension, the transgression of the limits, quest for instability, as contemporary art permanently is always at stake, explores new ways, contests and does the spadework on. The Gallery expresses these points.

An art Gallery as an experience of sensations
Lines, surfaces, folds, section : a new territory

The floor and the roof are engraved, fractured, open and animated by tectonic movements which give opposite directions for displacements and, at the same time, connect and articulate inside and outside spaces. On the two surfaces of the floor and of the roof and through them, the structure of the existing building introduces grid and frame as places of stability. The open garden/terrace is perceived as a vertical axe of rotation from where the inside and outside, horizontal and vertical folds are proceeding. It gives to the visitors the attractivity of a constant discovery.

Landscape and garden/terrace

The roof surface is a landscape. It is a projection surface of the art trail below. It creates an abstract continuity outside/inside.
The landscape changes on rythms of artificial saisons. It’s an abstract art garden, it refers to the land art with artificiality : glacier, moor landscape, aerial zoom view of Mars, graphic or geometric composition of light… This landscape terrace is offered to the visitors of the Gallery and to the city.

Even this terrace is more a piece of artificial landscape, it offers multiples textures under the feet of the visitors : roughness, deepness, smooth, softness, density, brightness, matness…

The central volume of running water is there for refreshing the air. Over the centre of the foyer it creates a sensation of freshness by evaporation during the hot weather.. Sand, gravels, smooth limestone, bright surface of water, gramineous… the landscape terrace becomes a place of calm, freshness and sensual textures.

Exhibiition

The exhibition room, by its nature and the courses and flux introduced inside is a landscape.The foyer receives pieces of art. The red « Z » runing through the courtyard, the foyer, the terrace, the restaurant and the roof is a projection screen. It reinforces the impression of the all Gallery as a runing space, from the public space to the private space to the public space in a continuous fluidity.

In opposition with the dynamism of the spaces around, the exhibition spaces are perceived as more neutral. They are developped in a non regular, but simple, space given to the artists, offered to multiple ways to exhibit : hanging, suspending, floating, on/in the floor…

The building in use

A clearly legible building where the pleasure of the visit and the promenade reinforces and increases the pleasure of discovering the exhibits. The exhibition room and the other activities in relatio

Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome {with Burkhard Morass} by Odile Decq in Italy won the WA Award Cycle 1. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.