MAXXI Rome
MAXXI might be considered Zaha Hadid's most successful building. Short for Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (National Museum of 21st Century Arts) it is a contemporary art museum in the Flaminio quarter of Rome, just slightly north of the city center. Like the Whitney Museum of American Art or The Met Breuer, it is an interdisciplinary space for exhibitions and performances..
The museum honors Rome's history with a seamless use of concrete, something the Romans mastered as best seen at the Pantheon. Her design also references the minaret in Samarra and Bernini's columns in the main piazza of the Vatican..
The museum almost seems like a spaceship dropped into a rather unassuming neighborhood in Rome where none of the neighboring architecture looks anything like it. .
The building commission was integral to the museum's mission..
"The MAXXI design goes beyond the concept of the building-museum. The complexity of the volumes, the curving walls, the variations and intersections of the levels determine a very rich spatial and functional configuration that visitors may pass through via ever different and unexpected routes.".
Hadid was adamant that the museum would not be an "object container" but an art campus that would overlap, connect and flow to create interactive spaces..
The space was also crafted to be suitable for a busy schedule of temporary exhibitions spaces. There are few immovable walls and the staircases seem to float within the museum's interior. The open ceiling allows natural light to flow inside..
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