Roma | MAXXI_National Museum of the XXI Century Arts | Zaha Hadid

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I have had the chance to visit Zaha's latest building in Roma: The Maxxi ( museum of art of the XXI century) which is due to open in feb.2010 There is very good There is less convincing, but it has been an incredible spatial experience.
Beeing an architecture student in the early 90's in Paris, there was different movements to choose from: from corbuesque inspiration "a la Ciriani", to so called " french touch" à la Perrault or Decq. There was something different to be seen in the US with total deconstructivism such as feeded at Cooper Union, or with Liebeskind or Eisenmann's late 80's style. Then came the first CAD projects, and the dictatorship of computer made architecture which is today producing the best images or perspectives, and the most sexy shapes that each major town across the planet is dreaming to have ( thnx to the Bilbao syndrom). The fascinating work of Zaha Hadid fits in this genre, very smart, very smooth, but too much flow and form oriented to my tastes ( any project that could have been dropped on the moon as is, or fitted in town A or B or C without raising any question is suspicious in my contextualist architect's mind). Finally, I am there, entering that building of hers, which is going to be dedicated to XXI's century art, in the northern part of Rome, a stone throw away from Piano's Auditorium, or Nervi's sport hall.
The project is glued to an existing rectangular building, on a wide L shape plot. Zaha's design symbolises the flows going back and forth from the street to the end of the L, and is quite efficient in providing dialog with the surrounding buildings and streets. It offers delicate pathways with cinemascope openings ( too rare) on the mineral garden created ( building is less invading on the terrain than the winning project). Strangely enough it is a project that I found too self oriented, meaning there is not so often ways of perceiving the outside, when this happens its between layers of thick green tinted glass between other layers of concrete stripes and pathways: the architecture offers itself for its own users: it offers zillions of perspectives due to the curvy shapes, but not so many dialogs with the outside world ( reeinforcing my idea toward spaceship / selfish architecture). Inside spaces between the main galleries are simply fantastic spacewise: the main hall with the suspended stairs and snake like shape gateways, the ever changing views, the smartness of simplicity in the design of those spaces is a spatial experiment that I rarely had...( it reminded me on one of the first shock I had in Berlin, not in Mie's gallery but in Sharoun's City Library).. there is magic in projects that can provide physical feelings of that sort ( it will surely become a must have for SF movies Director of photography).
Flows: Fluidity of movement is something that is also totally fascinating in this building: you climb wide stairs, get into narrower paths, then space spreads horizontally then narrows into that small tunnel back onto a ramp that conducts to one of the galleries...curved walls guide me to the next step or spatial experience. Every curve is made to be seen with the ceiling, lighting, and even wall/ground connection with a 10cm high gap adding to the feeling.
On the less convincing sides is natural light: the whole project is drawn in curves: the main roof beams adding to the fluidity: made in highly performant fiber reinforced concrete, they are thin ( lines), but they are high, they are close together ( think spatial combs) and combined with their 50% warmgrey color and the fixed solar control shades on the roof: they eat way too much light, which, for a museum or a gallery is something I find strange. In the main gallery halls, there is even light diffusors/ blades that seem also to have an acoustic control role, that add another layer of light eater. I wonder why everything has to be artifically lit in a museum, when there is so many interesting ways of controling natural light from the ceiling ( think Kahn, Piano, Scarpa..): conclusion: its a bit dark in there, especially for a sunny day!
Some details will also in the life of the building pose maintenance problems for sure: the translucent plexiglas ceilings that are a trademark of all pathways and staircases: there is construction issues i am sure with how you can maintain rigidity in those boxes, and i am sure this is well thought: but my experience is that it collects dusts and other particles that tend to make it look dirty: in the main hall pictures you can see there will be a big surface of them, and I wonder how this will be kept clean!! ( they seem all CNC cut to the right curve of course, in case you wonder).. There is also a few wonderings I have toward the central hall in the café area: the glass roof is a junior structural engineer wetdream, but it does not provide more than that: there is so much thickness in all the beams that the light ( as in heavy opposition) effect is anhilated..The Café is not very " dolce vita"/ friendly like and all that thick greenish glass is getting on my nerves when i'm exiting the building ( i feel a mix of airport / office / high tech look sensation that lack poetry and user empathy..like i'm beeing forced into the architecture, not guided ).
I'll return there when the building is at full rig with collections etc to see how they manage to use the provided space: Rome has a nice contemporary building finally ( forget about Richard's Meier's wrecked attemps on the Tiber that must have been designed using a RM gimmicks plug in in a software) that is worth really the experience: Future will tell if this works as a museum, or if users will be able to fit in there: but it surely gives energy and credit to Zaha's team talent!


C&C welcome

Fonte: Playtime

[Márcio Ferreira]

MAXXI_National Museum of the XXI Century Arts by Zaha Hadid





Photographer Luke Hayes has sent us a selection of photos of the MAXXI_National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome by architect Zaha Hadid.


The 27,000 square metre centre is Italy’s first national public museum of comtemporary arts and features two museums – MAXXI Art and MAXXI Architecture.


All photos here are copyright Luke Hayes and used with permission. Please see our copyright notice.

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In the words of Zaha Hadid
‘An interesting thing about the museum in Rome is that it is no longer an object, but rather a field, which implies that many programs could be attached to the museum. It’s no longer a museum, but a centre.


Here we are weaving a dense texture of interior and exterior spaces. It’s an intriguing mixture of permanent, temporary and commercial galleries, irrigating a large urban field with linear display surfaces. It could be a library; there are so many buildings that are not standing next to, but are intertwined and superimposed over one another.


This means that, through the organizational diagram, you could weave other programs into the whole idea of gallery spaces. You can make connections between architecture and art – the bridges can connect them and make them into one exhibition.


That gives you the interesting possibility of having an exhibition across the field. You can walk through a whole segment of a city to view spaces. In Rome, the organization will allow you to have exhibitions across the field, but they can also be very compressed, so you have a great variety.’
- Zaha Hadid


The Project by Zaha Hadid Architects
The MAXXI relates to the urban context in which it is inserted by re-proposing the horizontal development of the former military barracks, in opposition to the taller residential buildings that surround the site. The geometric structure of the project is aligned along the two grids that regulate the urban structure of this part of the city.


The reinterpretation of these two geometric structures within the proposal generates the surprising geometric complexity of the campus. Sinuous lines harmonise the overall scheme and facilitate flows across the site, mediating between the two urban axes.


The pedestrian path that crosses the campus follows the soft lines of the museum, slipping under its cantilevered volumes. The interior of the building presents visitors with a glimpse of numerous views and openings that cross the structure: on the one hand protecting its contents between its solid walls, on the other inviting visitors to enter through its large glazed surfaces on the ground floor.


The main idea behind the project is directly related to the objective of creating a building for the presentation of the visual arts. The site is “furrowed” by exhibition spaces, the walls that cross its spaces, their intersections defining interior and exterior space. This system works on three levels, the second of which is the most complex and richest, with it various bridges that connect the building and the galleries. Visitors are invited to dive into a dense, continuous space instead of confronting the compact volume of an isolated building.


The interior space, defined by the walls of the display galleries, are covered by a glass roof that floods the spaces with natural light, filtered between the roof trusses. These latter reinforce the linearity of the spatial system and assist the articulation of the various directions, overlappings and bifurcations of the system of gallery spaces. The honed linearity of the walls facilitates circulation through the campus, inside the galleries and between the objects on display.


MAXXI: A Campus for Culture
The MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, instituted by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, is Italy’s first national public museum dedicated to contemporary creativity. The definitive home of the museum, designed by Zaha Hadid (winner of the 1999 international design competition) is currently nearing completion in Rome’s Flaminio neighbourhood, on the site of the former Montello Barracks. Since 2003 an experimental and innovative construction site has been working to complete this new, ultramodern museum.


The complex is home to two distinct institutions: MAXXI Art (directed by Anna Mattirolo) and MAXXI Architecture (directed by Margherita Guccione), focused on promoting the arts and architecture through the collection, conservation, study and dissemination of the most current movements. To date, the MAXXI Art collection contains over 300 works by such artists as Boetti, Clemente, Kapoor, Kentridge, Merz, Penone, Pintaldi, Richter, Warhol and others of equal fame.
The MAXXI Architecture collection features the personal archives of Carlo Scarpa, Aldo Rossi, Pierluigi Nervi and others, as well as projects by contemporary architects such as Toyo Ito, Italo Rota and Giancarlo De Carlo, together with the photographic collections of the Atlante italiano and Cantiere d’autore projects.


Designed as a campus of arts and culture, the multi-disciplinary and multi-functional MAXXI is also a new urban space open to the entire city. The MAXXI’s 27,000 m2 contain – in addition to the two museums – an auditorium, a library and media library, a bookshop, a cafeteria, temporary exhibition spaces, various open spaces for live events, commercial activities, workshops and spaces of study and recreation.


Open to the city and the world, the MAXXI aims to become a point of reference for public and private institutions in Italy and abroad, for artists, architects and the general public. The integration of Zaha Hadid’s project within the fabric of the city is made possible by an architectural solution that develops the idea of an urban campus. In fact, the MAXXI casts aside the idea of the “closed” building in favour of a broader dimension that extends the interior spaces into the exterior spaces around the building, open to the entire neighbourhood.


The two museums – MAXXI Art and MAXXI Architecture – rotate around a large, double storey atrium, the point of connection with the permanent collection galleries and temporary exhibition spaces, the auditorium, reception area, cafeteria and bookshop. Outside, a pedestrian path follows the shape of the building, slipping under its cantilevered volumes and restoring an urban connection interrupted for almost a century by the former military structure.
In opposition to the decisive architectural sign that dominates the exterior spaces and the atrium, a more sober spatial quality characterises the exhibition halls that host the collections of the two museums. A combination of glass (roof), steel (stairs and columns) and concrete (walls) defines the neutral appearance of the display spaces, while moveable panels ensure the flexibility of their use.
The fluid and sinuous forms and the variation and interweaving of different levels– assisted by the modulated use of natural light – combine to create a highly complex spatial and functional experience that offers continuously different and unexpected views, from the interior towards the open spaces. The project is characterised by two primary architectural elements: the exposed concrete walls that delimit the exhibition halls and determine the intertwining of volumes, and the transparent roof that modulates and filters natural light. Finally, the roofing system contains all of the various equipment required by the museum’s functions: it integrates operable glazing, natural light filtering devices, artificial illumination and environmental control systems.
MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo – via Guido Reni, 2f 00196 Roma
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Postado por Marcus Fairs em http://www.dezeen.com

[JVS]

Zaha Hadid's stairway into the futureWith its swooping curves, impossible angles and haunting views, Zaha Hadid's new museum of 21st-century art is her best work yet. Jonathan Glancey gets a guided tour in Rome

Jonathan Glancey guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 November 2009 21.30 GMT Article history

Bobsleigh … the stairway above the entrance hall to Zaha Hadid's Maxxi museum in Rome. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty

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 mesmerising 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 realise 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 centre 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 louvres 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."

This is a building of few colours: black, white, grey and the varied cream of exposed concrete. The walls and balustrades of the gallery's extraordinary stairs and passageways have been finished in the thick black primer used as an undercoat for new cars. (Highly durable and slightly rough to look at, the paint is surprisingly smooth to the touch.) The stairways rise up through the lobby, with their bare metal treads, disappearing mysteriously into the far recesses of the museum; the effect is cinematic – Piranesian, even – and wholly compelling.

There is a point on the first floor where you can choose to walk in one of three directions, between galleries, stairwells, liftshafts and lobbies. Two of these paths take you into the heart of the exhibition spaces, while a third projects you out of the main body of the museum, along a glazed walkway, allowing you to look in at the gallery as if from the outside – a haunting effect. "For me, it's like standing in [Rome's] Piazza del Popolo," Hadid says. "When you look north, you see the tridente [three streets set between two 17th-century baroque churches] offering you this sudden and thrilling choice of direction. Yet, coming south, all three streets lead back to the same single point."

This is a brave project, and little short of incredible in a city that has proved so deeply conservative over the past decade. In recent years, there has been little imaginative new architecture in Rome, least of all in the public sector. But, remarkably, Maxxi is funded by what is now the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, or, as it describes itself, "a laboratory for artistic experimentation and production that gives voice to the different languages of contemporariness". Rome's history is inexhaustible, but it is good to see the city moving forward.

In one sense, however, Maxxi is happily old-fashioned. It has been built on-site by local contractors using materials close to hand; Rome led the way when it came to concrete construction 2,000 years ago, and these ambitious new curved walls are made of Roman concrete. "It does sound odd when I say it," says Racana, "but this has been a little like building a medieval cathedral." And, like a medieval cathedral, the museum is in fact several structures gathered together. Tough new legislation ensuring the ability of new buildings to withstand seismic shock was put in place after the earthquake of October 2002, which rocked Italy's Molise and Puglia regions, and was felt in Rome. As a result, the museum consists of five separate buildings leaning against one another, designed to withstand powerful natural shocks.

Last week, the roof of Hadid's aquatic centre for the 2012 Olympics was unveiled, a wavy promise of things to come. Hadid won't be pressed on this, and says she will be happy to talk about the building only when it is complete, once the pools are filled and the swimmers are training. "All people want to do is talk about the budget, as if the rise in cost has been something we've caused. We haven't. We've done what we've been asked to do." Her hope, and that of the Olympic committee, is that the building will inspire Britain's sporting stars.

Likewise, I have a feeling that the energy and imagination of this new museum, its sense of intrigue and possibilities, will bring out the best in its curators. Who knows what twists and turns architecture will take in the course of the 21st century; for now, Hadid's gallery offers an exhilarating set of Roman walls to build upon.

in http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/16/zaha-hadid-maxxi-rome

[JVS]

Zaha hits Rome

It began as a jagged scribble on a page of lined notepaper. The scribble morphed into a sombre artwork in dark acrylic paint. And that, in turn, spawned hundreds of pages of computer-generated images in a small architectural practice in London. This weekend, Rome will feel the seismic shock of that scribble, whose sinuous re-expression in 51,000 tons of concrete and steel has given the city its Bilbao moment. Zaha Hadid's €150m Maxxi museum of contemporary art is up, and stunning.

But for three hours or so on Thursday, the bow-wave of expectation created by Hadid's presence upstaged the building. It's what she does. After giving a press conference in front of 300 international journalists and Rome's most elegant culture vultures, Hadid was surrounded for 90 minutes by an amoebic shoal of cameramen and interviewers, two personal assistants trailing her like pilot fish. The world's most glamorous architect finally took refuge on a translucent plastic Louis Ghost chair at a table screened from public view behind an angular wall in the huge, triple-height volume of the building's reception area.

Here, tended by her minders, Hadid ranged from subject to subject in the languidly playful way that has become characteristic: the dreadful cappuccino she'd just been served; the appalling outbreaks of intellectual masturbation at London's Architectural Association, where her drawings as a student in the 1970s caused a sensation; the repellent nature of smoked mozzarella; and the fact that her co-principal and chief proselytiser, Patrik Schumacher, simply wasn't eating enough potatoes. Most significant was the way she returned several times to recollections of the original scribbles that ultimately created the wall behind her, and the 100m-long galleries that lay, in skews and curves and giant shelves above her: "I remember every line of those drawings."

Maxxi is Hadid's fourth completed large-scale building, but it is far more significant than the 2003 Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the BMW factory near Leipzig and the Phaeno science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. And Maxxi is not an architectural progression, but the very Ground Zero of her work. When she designed the museum, her studio was small, and struggling to get significant commissions. Her breakthrough triumph in the Maxxi design competition turned her from a largely occult architectural legend into a very public one.

Today, Hadid employs more than 300 designers in a converted 19th-century school in Clerkenwell; dozens of blue-chip projects, ranging from opera houses in China to furniture, flicker across the rows of computer screens. And in this delayed revelation of her original big idea for Maxxi, Hadid's wait precisely mirrors Frank Gehry's experience: his design for the Bilbao Guggenheim museum actually began life in his earlier, but postponed, architectural concept for the Walt Disney Symphony Hall in Los Angeles.

Maxxi is the well spring, the scribbled DNA that has informed Hadid's later work. There's a clear architectural link between the geometry of the BMW factory and Maxxi. In the former, part-assembled cars pass on tracks over diners in the canteen; in the latter, when it officially opens in May, artworks will hang from the concrete and fibreglass ribs whose striations form the top-lit ceilings.

But what's this ferroconcrete DNA like? Does it make any sense – or is Maxxi just another grandiose architectural icon for the hard of understanding, or those who crave another pseudo-visionary wow-moment? The first thing to say is that Maxxi makes a much more complex and challenging physical statement than the BMW building, or Phaeno.

The sweeping geometry of its form and its internal configuration are almost baroque in the way they modulate volume, light and glimpsed views. Exterior spaces are intertwined, sometimes dramatically, at other times with an almost graceful restraint. Inside, the drama is much more visceral. Heavy black staircases, underlit by white lightboxes, rise as if in flowing oriental brush strokes into the overlapping volumes of the gallery spaces. We seem to be in an Expressionist film set.

Hadid's metaphors are very different. "The walls of the Maxxi create major streams and minor streams," she says. "The major streams are the galleries and the minor streams are the connections and the bridges." And in reaction to the mixture of an orthogonal urban grid and a diagonal street meeting one edge of the building's site, the architecture mutates into a form characterised by "bundling and twisting".

That phrase is applied to every building designed by Hadid and Schumacher. So, too, are other conceptual mantras that describe the architecture of Maxxi as "porous, immersive, a field space, the notion of drift". The idea of architecture whose masses and spaces drift, says Hadid, has been alien to architecture but is well understood in art. "We take this opportunity to confront the material and conceptual dissonance evoked by art since the 1960s." That path, she argues, leads away from the sanctified object towards "fields of multiple associations and the necessity for change".

And that's a bombshell of a remark because the creative bedrock of Hadid's architecture lies in the avant-garde geometry of Russian Suprematist and Constructivist art in the 1920s; an art whose response to modernity delivered simultaneous jolts of velocity and points of fracture. It was anti-object. But in buildings such as Phaeno, the sense of a sanctified architectural object, something heavy and locked in a specific moment rather than an expanding one, remained. The fact that Hadid is now equating her architecture with the dissonances of 1960s art means that phrases such as "bundling and twisting" may soon be superseded by ideas from new sources – and by different kinds of architectural form.

The weird thing about Maxxi is the way it so vividly relates to her early student drawings, yet also demonstrates a move away from them. The architecture is another kind of art entirely, and the first of Hadid's works to react to the restrictions and promptings of its site with a deference that has not been seen in the past. The roof of Maxxi is one storey lower than the blocks of flats around the site, and the pale concrete has a soft appearance that almost matches the stucco of the 19th-century ex-barracks buildings on one side. The way Maxxi's façades are modelled and the way the bundles and twists of the form have been teased apart have turned a massive form into artfully arranged splays of ferroconcrete tagliatelle.

Only time will tell us if Maxxi works as an art museum and incubator for new artists and architects – a 21st-century Bauhaus in the Via Guido Reni, a quiet street named after the 17th-century painter whose works John Ruskin described as "taint and stain, and jarring discord, marked sensuality and impurity". One can't help wondering what Ruskin would have made of the scribbles, and the concrete, that have finally put Rome in the art world's premier division.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...e-1820383.html