This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
This Website Uses Cookies
By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn More
This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
Architectural Record logo
search
cart
facebook twitter linkedin youtube
  • Sign In
  • Subscribe
  • Sign Out
  • My Account
Architectural Record logo
  • NEWS
    • Latest News
    • Interviews
    • Reviews
    • Commentary
    • Editorials
  • PROJECTS
    • Building Types
    • Interior Design
    • Museums & Arts Centers
    • Adaptive Reuse
    • Colleges & Universities
    • Lighting
    • Snapshot
  • HOUSES
    • Record Houses
    • House of the Month
    • Featured Houses
    • Kitchen and Bath
  • PRODUCTS
    • Material World
    • Categories
    • Award Winners
    • Case Studies
    • Partners in Design
    • Trends & Insights
  • EXCLUSIVES
    • Best Architecture Schools
    • Top 300 Firms
    • Theme Issues
    • Record Houses
    • Record Products
    • Good Design Is Good Business
    • Design Vanguard
    • Historical Archive
    • Cocktail Napkin Sketch
    • Videos
  • CALL FOR ENTRIES
    • Record Houses
    • Guess the Architect Contest
    • Submit Your Work
  • CONTINUING ED
    • Architectural Technology
    • Architect Continuing Education
    • Continuing Education Center
    • Digital Academies
  • EVENTS
    • Record on the Road
    • Innovation Conference
    • Women In Architecture
    • Webinars
    • Advertising Excellence Awards
  • MORE
    • Subscribe
    • Customer Service
    • Digital Edition
    • eNewsletter
    • Interactive Spotlight
    • Store
    • Custom Content Marketing
    • Research
    • Sponsor Insights
    • eBooks
  • CONTACT
    • Advertise
Home » Plays Well with Others
Commentary & Criticism

Plays Well with Others

The 228,000-square-foot MAXXI opened in May 2010.
Plays Well with Others
The 228,000-square-foot MAXXI opened in May 2010.
Photo © Iwan Baan
The Zaha Hadid building incorporates a former military barracks as part of the museum.
Plays Well with Others
The Zaha Hadid building incorporates a former military barracks as part of the museum.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
A new plaza helps connect MAXXI with the surrounding neighborhood.
Plays Well with Others
A new plaza helps connect MAXXI with the surrounding neighborhood.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
A new plaza helps connect MAXXI with the surrounding neighborhood.
Plays Well with Others
A new plaza helps connect MAXXI with the surrounding neighborhood.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
The entry to the museum serves as a place for art.
Plays Well with Others
The entry to the museum serves as a place for art.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
A series of terraced galleries provide flowing spaces for exhibitions.
Plays Well with Others
A series of terraced galleries provide flowing spaces for exhibitions.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
Overhead fins help modulate daylight in a gallery.
Plays Well with Others
Overhead fins help modulate daylight in a gallery.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
A winding ramp runs through one of the terraced galleries.
Plays Well with Others
A winding ramp runs through one of the terraced galleries.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
The main stairwell also provides large spaces for sculpture and paintings.
Plays Well with Others
The main stairwell also provides large spaces for sculpture and paintings.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
The stair works as a sculptural element in the museum's lobby.
Plays Well with Others
The stair works as a sculptural element in the museum's lobby.
Photo by Clifford A.Pearson
The 228,000-square-foot MAXXI opened in May 2010.
The Zaha Hadid building incorporates a former military barracks as part of the museum.
A new plaza helps connect MAXXI with the surrounding neighborhood.
A new plaza helps connect MAXXI with the surrounding neighborhood.
The entry to the museum serves as a place for art.
A series of terraced galleries provide flowing spaces for exhibitions.
Overhead fins help modulate daylight in a gallery.
A winding ramp runs through one of the terraced galleries.
The main stairwell also provides large spaces for sculpture and paintings.
The stair works as a sculptural element in the museum's lobby.
November 15, 2012
Peter Plagens
Reprints
No Comments

Architects & Firms

Zaha Hadid Architects

Report card: Zaha Hadid's MAXXI turns out to be a good place to see art.

There's a giant, white, habitable sculpture sitting in the midst of Rome's nondescript Flaminio district just north of the city center. Its exterior juxtaposes sinuous curves and sharply angled planes, and its interior flows in smooth, serpentine capaciousness. It's Zaha Hadid's National Museum of XXI Century Arts (better known as MAXXI), and doubtless it's a work of art itself. But museums aren't supposed to be stand-alone masterpieces. They're supposed to display and enhance other works of art to visual and contextual advantage.

The 228,000-square-foot MAXXI opened in May 2010.

Museums that call too much attention to themselves can be a problem, or at least take some getting used to. After a half-century of use, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959) has finally achieved an uneasy peace with the sculpture, paintings, and works of installation art that find their way onto its premises. On the other hand, Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum (which opened in 2006) is still getting mixed reviews–to put it charitably–about the way art struggles to hold its own against the building's radically triangular structure. But two years after its opening, MAXXI is treating art rather well.

When Hadid entered the competition to design MAXXI, one of the ideas floated for its programming was to concentrate on Arte Povera, the abject style that was Italy's main contribution to post–World War II art. (The mind boggles a bit at the thought of such a sophisticated, glamorous edifice as a thematic home for art like Piero Manzoni's infamous 1961 can of Künstlerscheiss.) Fortunately, the museum's purpose was expanded to explicate contemporary art and architecture across the board. MAXXI is also Italy's only national museum dedicated to contemporary art–the others are regional or local–which gives it an advantage in prestige.

To make MAXXI accommodating to art, Hadid designed a set of contiguous indoor terraces that turn out to be a graceful solution to manifesting “separate” galleries in an emphatically open interior. The absence of disruptive walls gives art room to breathe, while the discrete and nicely shaped balcony-esque galleries allow relevant works of art to be gathered together in conversational closeness. Tridimensionale, an exhibition that ran from March to September, clearly benefited from these spaces. In the show, very dissimilar sculpture by Juan Muñoz (stylized bronze figures) and Franz West (faux-homely abstractions) enjoyed a kind of visual fellowship.

Moving among MAXXI's semi-separate staging areas is similarly amiable. Long, airy ramps, gently segmented stairways, and good lighting make traversing from one exhibition to another a pleasantly anticipatory experience. MAXXI does have a few white-cube spaces, and they work well, especially with one of the best photography exhibitions I've seen in years: To Face, Paola De Pietri's mesmerizing, large-format color images of World War I battlegrounds on the Italian front.

The most encouraging architectural aspect of MAXXI is its receptiveness to–indeed, crying out for–site-specific pieces that integrate themselves into the museum's own sculpture-like morphology. Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen's installation this summer of children's garments hung on long, tapering rows of clotheslines–visible from both inside and outside the museum–humanized and softened the scale of the building. This is the institutional quality that prompted Carlos Basualdo, curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to sign on as MAXXI's curator-at-large three years ago.“MAXXI is a building that, in many ways, dictates a program, and certainly calls for a close collaboration with living artists,” he says.

MAXXI does have problems, to be sure, but they have less to do with quality than quantity–the small amount of art it owns and the large sum of money it needs to keep going. It is hamstrung by having had to start a collection from scratch, mostly with government funds, in a country with a patchy history of private collectors donating art to public museums. Still, the roster of artists in MAXXI's holdings is impressive: Gerhard Richter, Kara Walker, Ed Ruscha, Rose Marie Troeckel, Anselm Kiefer, Mario Merz, Alighiero e Boetti, and younger artists such as Giorgio Andreotta Calò and Rosella Biscotti. The museum is collecting renowned artists but also taking some chances.

Alas, good things in the museum world don't come cheap. MAXXI requires about $12 million a year to operate, which it has tried to cobble together from ticket sales (attendance is just OK), profits from the bookshop and restaurant, corporate sponsors, and some private donations. There has been a lot of infighting between the Fondazione MAXXI, which runs the museum, and the national Ministry of Cultural Heritage. The ministry said MAXXI will incur a $13 million deficit between now and 2014, while the Fondazione's erstwhile president, Pio Baldi, claimed that the shortfall was illusory. Baldi resigned in May, and the museum was put into a “compulsory administration” (a.k.a. receivership) under a special commissioner. MAXXI is now scouring the country for new sponsors, and its officials say it will have some good news to announce.

Let's hope so. The museum itself is that rare work of art that's generous to other works of art. It would be a pity if MAXXI were to be substantially deprived of art or, worse, if contemporary art had no MAXXI to enjoy at all.

Peter Plagens is a painter and art critic and was a senior writer at Newsweek from 1989 to 2003.

AR Subscribe

Recent Articles by Peter Plagens

'Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect' at the Bronx Museum of Art

Ai Weiwei Explores Surveillance with 'Hansel & Gretel' at the Park Avenue Armory

Close up: David Ireland's 500 Capp Street Project by Architectural Resources Groups and Jensen Architects

Peter Plagens is an artist and critic whose last book was Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (Phaidon).

Related Articles

Ai Weiwei Explores Surveillance with 'Hansel & Gretel' at the Park Avenue Armory

Discipline Problem

Related Products

CCDI Architecture Interaction with a Complex Context

You must login or register in order to post a comment.

Report Abusive Comment

More Videos

AR Huber Webinar 12/10


 


 

Events

December 10, 2019

New Options for Insulating and Venting Wood-Framed Sloped Roofs

Credits: 1 AIA LU/HSW; 1 AIBD P-CE; 0.1 IACET CEU

May qualify for learning hours through most Canadian architectural associations

A comprehensive overview of the control layers of a wood-framed sloped roof assembly. New code provisions will be discussed for high-performance, green and sustainable building practices. The differences between vented and unvented assembly requirements will be defined. In conclusion, a review of the emerging 2018 code provisions will be done as well as a comparison of different methods to providing continuous and integrated air, water, and thermal barrier.

December 12, 2019

Improving Building Delivery with BIM

Credits: 1 AIA LU/Elective; 1 AIBD P-CE; 0.1 IACET CEU
May qualify for learning hours through most Canadian architectural associations

BIM brings countless advantages to the construction team, but the biggest benefit lies with the owner. For architects continuing to develop and enhance delivery methods, BIM is the solution. In this webinar with Rob Glisson, AIA, principal at ROJO Architecture, see how BIM can help you reduce risk, accelerate schedules, establish more accurate budgets, decrease costs, and better serve your clients.

View All Submit An Event

Products

ENR Square Foot Costbook 2020

ENR Square Foot Costbook 2020

See More Products

Tweets by @ArchRecord

Architectural Record

AR December 2019 Cover

2019 December

In the December 2019 issue, Architectural Record reveals the winners of the annual Record Products contest.

View More Subscribe
  • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Survey And Sample
    • Editorial Calendar
  • Call for Entries
  • Subscribe
    • Subscribe
    • Renew
    • Create Account
    • Change Address
    • Pay My Bill
    • Free eNewsletters
    • Customer Care
  • Advertise
    • Architectural Record
    • Advertising Awards
  • Industry Jobs

Copyright ©2019. All Rights Reserved BNP Media.

Design, CMS, Hosting & Web Development :: ePublishing