MAXXI

• Customer: Ministero delle Infrastrutture e dei Trasporti Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali
• Year: 2010
• City: Roma
• ATI Joint venture: Italiana Costruzioni spa - SAC spa

AN INNOVATIVE CONSTRUCTION SITE FOR A PROJECT THAT GOES BEYOND THE CONCEPT OF A MUSEUM BUILDING.
Zaha Hadid’s new National Museum of 21st-Century Arts is an extraordinary building whose construction
required a team of specialists that erected one of the most innovative sites in the world.

The design of the building dedicated to the new contemporary art and architecture exhibition quarter was chosen following an international competition in two stages announced by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in 1998. The winning design by Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid was selected for its ability to fit into the urban fabric and its innovative architecture, capable of interpreting the potential of the new institute and endowing it with an extraordinary series of public spaces. The MAXXI project goes beyond the concept of the museum building. The complexity of its volumes, curved walls, and variation and intermingling of levels create a complex spatial and functional arrangement that visitors cross using countless different and unexpected paths. Multiple rooms form a sequence of galleries illuminated by natural light filtered by a unique roofing system. The full-height hall contains the reception area and opens onto the auditorium, the galleries destined to house the permanent collections, the exhibitions and the café and bookshop areas. The idea that guided the project was the creation of a campus open to public circulation: the geometric layout of the design is aligned with the two street grids of the area; the two main axes are mediated by sinuous lines that harmonise the pattern and aid the flow of visitors within the site. The site is delineated by exhibition areas – the curved walls – that run across the space; the intersections of the walls define the indoor and outdoor areas. The indoor areas are covered by a glass roof that floods them with natural light filtered by a system of joists, emphasising the linearity of the spatial arrangement and helping articulate the various directions. The construction of the MAXXI building was a work within a work: clients, designers and constructors put together a team of specialists that directed one of the most innovative construction sites with the aim of creating a cutting-edge art quarter not only for Italy, but also for Europe. The construction site was a veritable testing ground. One of the most delicate stages was the creation of the large reinforced-concrete dividing walls that define the hall and the galleries: huge monolithic blocks cast in a single piece and assembled in such a way that the joints are invisible. The attentive design of the caissons and the meticulous planning of the preparatory and casting stages made it possible to create the combination of gashes and structural overhangs of the galleries that so strongly characterises the buildingʼs image. The same method was used for work on the interior of the building: the complex arrangement of steel staircases, which wind like ribbons suspended in the empty space of the hall, was achieved by coordinating the work of the various players involved in the construction of the project, striving to optimise the resources involved in the entire building process. The MAXXI construction site was thus a testing ground of techniques capable of taking the performance of structures and materials to the extreme: a case study in how the building stage is not merely a moment of engineering downstream of an independent design stage,
but instead an integral part of the work.