The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Zaha Hadid · a national museum of contemporary art and architecture: two museums, MAXXI Arte and MAXXI Architettura, in one building · long gallery volumes drawn as bands that run parallel, bend, overlap and cross one another, with no closed rooms in the traditional sense; a full-height entrance atrium where the bands meet, crossed by black steel stairs and bridges at several levels; the upper band cantilevered over the forecourt and ending in a large window toward the city · walls of exposed concrete cast in place on long curves, bounding the galleries and carrying the spans and the cantilever; a glazed roof over closely spaced concrete beams, or fins, with louvres and screens to admit and filter daylight · an open forecourt and a public route through the site; one block of the former barracks kept and folded into the complex · on the ground of the former Caserma Montello, Via Guido Reni, in the Flaminio quarter of Rome · international competition 1998 to 1999, completed 2009, opened to the public May 2010 · Zaha Hadid Architects, the design led by Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher, for the Italian state through the Ministry of Culture, run since 2009 by a public foundation · as it stands, in use since 2010, nothing lost, replaced or rebuilt; scored as the building with its forecourt, its route and the retained barracks block
Mode
National museum as public field; the visit made a route chosen by the visitor through bands of concrete, the institution a crossing place continued from the city’s ground
Mythos
The path: river, stream and confluence, routes that branch and rejoin, a labyrinth without a centre; built into the plan as a pattern of movement, leading to no threshold, sanctuary or summit
Phase
Competition 1998 to 1999; completed 2009; opened May 2010; RIBA Stirling Prize 2010; in use for sixteen years, its galleries argued over since the opening
Presentation
Exposed concrete walls cast on long curves; a glazed roof over concrete fins with louvres and screens; black steel stairs and bridges in a full-height atrium; a cantilevered upper gallery ending in a window; a retained barracks block; an open forecourt
Register
Exhilaration and speed, cool and grey; light from above falling through the fins; rarely awe, and at its plainest a long concrete corridor
Scale
One national institution of two museums on one city block of Rome, laid out in bands from the grain of the plot and the streets round it
Governing Proposition
The Italian state holds a competition for a national museum of the art and architecture of its century, on the ground of a barracks in Rome, and Zaha Hadid’s office answers with a museum that has no rooms: long bands of cast concrete that run, bend and cross, meet in a tall atrium of black stairs and end in a window over the city. The wager is that a museum can be a field of routes rather than a sequence of rooms, a public ground continued indoors, and that the drawn flow of the office can be cast as structure. The route and the casting hold. The wall that bounds the route is a wall the art does not easily hang on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The site was a barracks. The Caserma Montello stood in the Flaminio quarter of Rome, on an L-shaped plot between low blocks, and when the Italian state, through its Ministry of Culture, set out to make a national museum of the art and architecture of the twenty-first century, it gave the museum this ground. An international competition was held in 1998 and 1999, and Zaha Hadid’s office won it. The building was completed in 2009 and opened to the public in May 2010, a decade after the competition. It has been run since 2009 by a public foundation.
The programme was two museums in one building: MAXXI Arte and MAXXI Architettura, a museum of the art of the century and a museum of its architecture. The design was led by Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher. Hadid’s line ran from paper projects to built ones: the fire station at Vitra and Phaeno in Wolfsburg. In Rome her office was given a state client, a public institution and a city whose museums are palaces, and it proposed a museum with no rooms.
One building of the barracks was kept. It stands on the site still, folded into the complex at the foot of the new building, and it is scored as part of the work. It obeys an older law, and the new building does not take it in: it sets itself against it and passes over it. The forecourt is open to the street, and a route runs through the site. The collections and exhibitions held inside are the building’s use and not its form.
Movement II
The plan is made of bands. Long gallery volumes, conceived as streams, run parallel, bend, overlap and cross over one another, with no closed rooms in the traditional sense. They take their direction from the grain of the plot and the lines of the streets around it, and they fill the L of the lot by turning its corner rather than by setting a block down on it. Straighten the bends and the building would no longer belong to its ground. The walls that bound the bands are the walls that carry them: plan and structure are one.
The visitor walks the bands and chooses at each crossing. River, stream and confluence are the architects’ images, and the pattern built into the plan is the path: routes that branch and rejoin, a labyrinth without a centre. It is the building’s archetype and it is load-bearing, since the plan is made of nothing else. But it is formal rather than deep. The path leads to no threshold, no sanctuary and no summit room, and where the bands end they end in a view.
What the bands bring into the open can be stated. A museum can be a field of routes rather than a sequence of rooms, entered from the street and crossed, so that the visit is a drift chosen by the visitor and the institution continues the city’s ground. A century without a canon is housed in a building without a hierarchy of rooms. In Rome, a city whose museums are palaces, the open forecourt and the route through the site make the public claim in fabric. It is an architectural idea more than a human or social condition, and it holds in part.
Movement III
Where the bands meet there is a tall void, the full height of the building. Black steel stairs and bridges cross it at several levels, daylight falls through the fins of the roof, and the concrete walls sweep past at a height the street did not prepare. The atrium is the building’s summit and the place where its idea is seen whole: every level visible at once, the institution made a crossing place, the visitor’s choices laid out in the air. The stairs are more than circulation needs. They are a demonstration of flow, and they are precise.
From the atrium the bands run on. The upper galleries are long and lit from above, and they carry the motion on until the upper band leaves the building’s mass and cantilevers over the forecourt, ending in a large window toward the city. After the enclosure it is a release, the whole flow turned out toward Rome. From the forecourt the same cantilever is seen passing over the kept barracks, the new building’s strongest image from outside.
The register is exhilaration and speed, cool and grey, and rarely awe. The heights come often and at one great height, in the atrium, and the galleries between are at their plainest long concrete corridors, so that the effect repeats. The window at the end of the cantilever is a view and not an arrival. Rome, which the building faces there, is not otherwise held by it: the history of the city is seen through one window.
Movement IV
A museum must show work, and the galleries have been criticised from the opening for curved and sloping walls that resist the hanging of it. Exhibitions have repeatedly been designed against the galleries, and partitions have been built inside the bands to make walls a painting can hang on. A partition standing against a curved concrete wall is the building’s argument and its cost in one view: the purpose removing what the form supplied, and a third law, the room’s, set inside the law of the bands.
The form knows something. It makes looking at art a matter of walking, choosing and turning back, and puts the programme in rooms and the visitor’s freedom and the public crossing are gone. It is the instrument of the building’s knowledge of movement. It is also the container, at times the adversary, of what the building exists to show. Art hung on a sloping concrete wall, or on a partition built against it, is shown by the building rather than in it, and the works become the second thing seen.
The roof makes the same bargain. Its concrete fins, with glazing, louvres and screens, shape the light of every upper gallery, and the light has needed control for the conservation of the works. The building’s daylighting and climate serve the space before the work. That is a cost of the making, and it falls on the use: a museum of light from above whose light has to be held back from what it was meant to light.
Movement V
The concrete is the achievement. Long walls cast in place on curves, fair-faced and finely finished, carry the spans and the cantilever, so that structure and enclosure are one material and the fluidity is structure, not skin. Hadid’s office had drawn flowing forms for twenty years; here it cast them, at the length of a city block, which separates the building from Bilbao. In 2010 the building won the RIBA Stirling Prize, and it has been widely praised as space while its galleries are argued over.
The building has been read since as the first fully built statement of Hadid’s mature idea of the field in a public institution, as a case in the casting of curved concrete and in daylighting from the roof, and as a measure of what a museum owes the art it holds. These are questions about its making and its type more than about what its form means; once walked, it is clear. Its reach is real and moderate, folded into the spread of fluid, digitally drawn public buildings that owes as much to the office as a whole and to Bilbao. It brought to Rome the first major work of contemporary architecture by a foreign architect of world standing in decades.
The building is sixteen years old. Its form survives whole as built, the barracks block still in place, and its use has been continuous since 2010, as the national museum of contemporary art and architecture, through a period of financial crisis in the institution that runs it. Sixteen years demonstrate little, and its surface belongs to a moment, the parametric fluidity of the 2000s, which it has not yet outlived. What it holds beyond that moment is the atrium, the stairs crossing the void under the fins, and the concrete that bends and carries at once.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on purpose, structure and site, and the site argument is real. The bands take their direction from the grain of the plot and the lines of the surrounding streets, and the L-shaped lot is filled by bands that turn its corner rather than by a block set down on it: straighten the bends and the building no longer belongs to its ground. Structure and plan are one, since the walls that bound the galleries are the walls that span. The subtractive test bites on purpose. A museum must show work, and bending walls, sloping floors and continuous voids are not required by showing it; partitions added against the walls are the purpose removing what the form supplied. The stairs across the atrium exceed what circulation needs. Much is compelled by the idea, less by the use.
Score: 7.2 / 10
What the building brings into the open can be stated: a museum can be a field of routes rather than a sequence of rooms, entered from the street and crossed, so that the visit is a drift the visitor chooses and the public institution continues the city’s ground; and the art of a century without a canon is housed in a building without a hierarchy of rooms. The open forecourt and the passage through the site make that public claim in fabric, in a city whose museums are palaces. It holds in part. The building also discloses, not by intention, that a museum built as movement makes the works the second thing seen. Much of what visitors carry away is a mood, exhilaration in concrete and light, and a mood ranks below a meaning.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Elevation comes often, and at one great height. The atrium is the summit: a tall void where the bands meet, black stairs and bridges flying across it at several levels, daylight falling through the fins of the roof, the concrete walls sweeping past at a height the street did not prepare. The upper galleries, long and lit from above, carry the motion on, and the cantilever ends in a window that turns the whole flow out toward Rome, a release after the enclosure. Seen from the forecourt, the cantilever over the old barracks is strong. The register is exhilaration and speed, cool and grey, rarely awe. The galleries at their plainest are long concrete corridors, and the effect repeats.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The pattern built into the plan is the path: the river, the confluence, routes that branch and rejoin, a labyrinth without a centre. It is load-bearing in that the plan is made of it, and the visitor walks the bands and chooses at each crossing. But the archetype is formal rather than deep. The path leads to no threshold, sanctuary or summit, and the window at the end of the cantilever is a view, not an arrival. River and stream are the architects’ images, evoked rather than built. The barracks kept on the site carries the memory of a military past, and the building answers it only by contrast. The deep pattern here is a diagram of flow, and with The Bottomless Well this is the lowest axis but one.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The inheritance: the museum as a sequence of rooms, from the palace gallery to the white cube; Wright’s Guggenheim, which made the visit one continuous ramp; the free-form museum after Bilbao; and Hadid’s own line, from the paper projects through the Vitra fire station and Phaeno in Wolfsburg. The departure is a national museum with no rooms, its walls bands that bend and cross, its concrete cast on curves at the scale of a city block, and that in Rome, a city of masonry, axis and palace. The stake was high: a decade from competition to opening, a state client, a hostile reception for the galleries, a casting few had attempted at this length. What holds the axis: the swerve lies on Hadid’s proven line, and the turn from the room had been taken by Wright and by Bilbao.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Would another form change what the building knows? In the visit, yes. The bands make looking at art a matter of walking, choosing and turning back, and the atrium makes the institution a crossing place where every level is seen at once. Put the programme in rooms and the visitor’s freedom and the public crossing are gone. In the use, the form fights its content. Art hung on a curved, sloping concrete wall, or on a partition built against it, is shown by the building rather than in it, and exhibitions have repeatedly been designed against the galleries. The form is the instrument of the building’s knowledge of movement, and the container, at times the adversary, of what it exists to show.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, over sixteen years. The building has been read as the first fully built statement of Hadid’s mature idea of the field in a public institution; as a case in casting long curved walls in concrete; as a study in daylighting from the roof; as a measure of what a museum owes the art, in a debate that began at the opening and continues; and as a test of the claims of the parametric moment for public space. These are questions about its making and its type more than about what its form means, and the building, once walked, is clear rather than inexhaustible. The record is short, and a new work can only be forecast on this axis; with The Archetypal Deep it is the lowest axis but one.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The field is the European museum and public building of the 2000s and 2010s, and Italian architecture in particular. The intrinsic force is real: the building constructed at institutional scale the museum as a continuous field, and showed that the drawn fluidity of Hadid’s office could be cast in concrete as structure rather than clad over a frame, which separates it from Bilbao. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: moderate, and partly absorbed into the general spread of fluid, digitally drawn public buildings, which owes as much to the office as a whole and to Bilbao as to this building. It brought the first major work of contemporary architecture by a foreign architect of world standing to Rome in decades, and a new institution has lived in it since. A strong instance of a turn, more than the turn itself.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole as built: the bands, the atrium, the stairs, the roof and the cantilever stand as the office made them, and the barracks block remains in place. The use has been continuous since 2010, in its own purpose, as the national museum of contemporary art and architecture, and the building has outlasted a period of financial crisis in the institution that runs it. Nothing in the record shows the fabric failing, and none is supposed. What holds the axis is age. The survival shown is of sixteen years, too short to demonstrate much, and the surface is tied to a moment of technology and taste, the parametric fluidity of the 2000s, which it has not yet outlived.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The concrete is the achievement: long walls cast in place on curves, fair-faced and finely finished, carrying the spans and the cantilever, so that structure and enclosure are one material and the fluidity is real rather than a skin on a frame. The roof of concrete fins with glazing and louvres is a made system that shapes the light of every upper gallery. The black stairs are precise. The costs hold the figure. The galleries’ walls and floors are hard to use and have needed added partitions; the light from the roof has needed control for the conservation of the works; and the building’s daylighting and climate serve the space before the work.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the black steel stair floating across the atrium and the concrete fins of the roof over a far gallery; or the window at the end of the cantilever and the floor of the lowest band. They obey one law: lines drawn from the site, running parallel, bending and crossing, so that wall, stair, roof beam, lighting track and floor follow the same streams from street to roof. Few buildings hold a single law so far through. Two things bend it. The retained barracks block obeys an older law and is set against the new rather than taken into it, and the partitions exhibitions build inside the bands obey a third, the room’s. The law is consistent over a narrow range, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Orders held: art and architecture, the building’s two museums, under one roof; the city, in a plan drawn from the streets and a public route across the site; the state, as the national museum of its century and a public client; military history, in the barracks kept on the site; and the body moving through space, which is the building’s whole subject. The section places the public route and the galleries in one field, so these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: labour, the family, the sacred, the natural order beyond daylight, and the history of Rome, which the building faces through one window rather than holds. A museum of one gesture holds few orders, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.2, then The Swerve, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.0, then The Sublime at 7.8. Long walls of concrete cast in place on curves, carrying the spans and the cantilever, so that the flow is structure and not skin; a national museum without rooms, cast at the scale of a city block in a city of palaces; a form and a use that survive whole since 2010; one law of lines drawn from the site, followed by wall, stair, roof beam and floor; and an atrium where the bands meet under the fins and the black stairs fly across the void.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: art, architecture, the city, the state, military history and the moving body held in one field, with labour, the family, the sacred and the history of Rome absent or seen through a window. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.1: the path built into the plan but leading to no threshold, and a short record whose questions concern the building’s making and its type more than what its form means. Then The Inevitable at 7.2 and The Unconcealment at 7.3: a form compelled by the site and the idea more than by the showing of work, and a disclosure of the museum as public field set beside a mood. These hold the work below Tier IV, and they are one fact: the building is an architectural idea of movement carried through with great command, and the art it exists for, the orders it holds and the depth it reaches are secondary to that idea. The Heydar Aliyev Center (7.6), by the same office, stands a tenth above, higher on The Sublime, The Made, Pressure on Tradition, The Living Form, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well, lower on The Inevitable and The Unconcealment, level on the rest. The Walt Disney Concert Hall (7.8) stands above it on ten axes and level on The Swerve and The Inner Law; the Seattle Central Library (7.9), a public institution of the same decade built as a reorganised programme, stands above it on nine, level on two and below it only on The Sublime. Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (8.6) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (8.4), the turns from the room that this building carried further, stand above it on every axis. The Atomium (7.5) stands level, with the longer survival where this building has the stronger making and law.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.2 falls three tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.5, The Made at 8.2 and The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Swerve at 8.0 and The Imperishable at 8.0 fall five tenths short of the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 nine tenths short, The Unconcealment at 7.3 a point and two tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 7.1 a point and four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 7.1, The Bottomless Well, 7.1, The Inevitable, 7.2, and The Unconcealment, 7.3, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 90.4, an average of 7.53 that displays 7.5: the work stands where its aggregate places it, in the band of Tier III, five tenths short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the building as built and published, of its plan, section, history and reception, known well in outline and less well in detail; not from a visit, and nothing was measured. The unit scored is the building: the one building of interlaced concrete galleries, its full-height entrance atrium with the black stairs and bridges, its glazed roof of concrete fins and louvres, the cantilevered upper gallery that ends in a window over the city, the open forecourt and the route through the site, and the retained block of the former barracks incorporated into the complex. The Flaminio quarter, Via Guido Reni and the nearby works of other architects are context and are not scored. The collections and exhibitions held inside, and the partitions built for them, are the building’s use and not part of its form; they are weighed where they bear on the use. The design is credited to Zaha Hadid Architects, led by Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher, for the Italian state through the Ministry of Culture; collaboration is not charged. As far as the record shows the building stands as it was completed in 2009: nothing original has been lost, replaced, relocated or rebuilt, and the barracks block kept from the earlier site remains in place. Nothing is quoted: no statement of the architects is held word for word, and the images of river and stream are paraphrased. The Stirling Prize of 2010 and the criticism of the galleries are facts of reception, weighed only as part of the record that has gathered round the building. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the project architect, the method and mix of the concrete, the material of the gallery floors, the floor area, the cost, the extent to which the roof’s screens have been closed, the frequency with which partitions have been built, the condition of the fabric, the governance of the foundation in the years after the opening, and the record of the building’s influence on Italian museum building since.