Contemporary art museum opens in Rome
With its artistic past secure, Italy seeks to protect a creative future.
ROME - Italy is opening its first national museum for contemporary arts and architecture in a bid to shed its image as merely a keeper of a glorious artistic past.
The $223 million Maxxi cultural center opens today for a limited weekend run before its full-fledged opening in a few months. The museum, located in a residential area of Rome, was designed by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.
The Culture Ministry decided to build the museum in 1998, recognizing that the country that produced Giotto, Michelangelo, and Bernini - the avant-garde artists of their times - must continue to promote contemporary creativity if it wants to have a cultural heritage in the future.
"It is inconceivable for this very long flow of Italian creativity to be interrupted and do without the promotion and support which, over past centuries, have generally kindled it," said Pio Baldi, who heads the foundation that runs the museum.
The center, officially called the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, is the latest in a series of cutting-edge architectural projects to be built in the Eternal City, which is better known for its Roman ruins, Baroque basilicas, and Renaissance palazzi.
Renzo Piano's Auditorium opened in 2002, giving Rome its first major-league concert hall. More controversially, Richard Meier's Ara Pacis museum, which houses a 2,000-year-old altar, opened in 2005. Critics complained the boxlike shell was a modern blot in Rome's historic center - to some, a gas station blocks away from the Spanish Steps.
No such protests befell Hadid's design, located on the grounds of a former military barracks in Rome's Flaminio neighborhood, far from the cobblestoned streets of the center but close enough to be reached on public transit and near the new concert hall.
Hadid said she intended the space to be an "urban cultural center," an arts campus with indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. The building itself - a sleek, windowed box atop a box - is made of cement walls, steel stairs and a glass roof, giving the galleries a neutral backdrop illuminated by filtered natural light.
"I see Maxxi as an immersive urban environment for the exchange of ideas, feeding the cultural vitality of the city," Hadid said.
Indeed, the museum is designed to be a research workshop of sorts, not just exhibiting contemporary art and architecture but incorporating contemporary design, fashion, film and advertising. Technically it is two museums: Maxxi Art and Maxxi Architecture, which houses the files of architecture designs.
Rome has several other modern and contemporary art spaces but the Culture Ministry says Maxxi is the first national museum devoted to contemporary arts.
Baldi, the Maxxi Foundation head, said the aim is for the museum to act as a sort of "antenna" for broadcasting Italian contemporary art overseas and receiving international culture at home.
"Art and architecture are essential components of the image and perception of a country abroad," he said. "This holds true today ever more immediately and rapidly" considering globalization.
Hadid is best known for her tram station in Strasbourg and her Vitra fire station in Germany, which was cited by the Pritzker jurors in awarding her the 2004 prize, architecture's most prestigious honor. She designed the aquatics center for the 2012 London Olympics, the Games' architectural showpiece.