At the same time, those years saw the great vitality of an emerging Italian architecture, with a mixture of neosituationism, radical rediscovery and digitalist upheavals. There was a strong impression that something new and secular was at last on the move, after at least two decades of academic sluggishness and stagnated experimentation.
So it looked as if most of these "promised" works would be charged with expectations and desires, at least by a part of Italian architectural culture, while waiting for these different signals to shake up a society unaccustomed to the contemporary and its new spaces. But then the excitement of new choices and of the first published renderings subsided into the slow and characteristically Italian administrative anticlimax of time passing, financial difficulties and political changes. All this led to the atavistic and very dangerous sensation that these courageous decisions would slowly but inexorably end up buried under tons of stamped documents and public indifference.
It is therefore interesting to return, after a few years, to the scene of the crime and to note that, on the contrary, the two Rome projects have not only been completed, but have in particular survived all those national ills that have spelt the silent death of so many other important previously judged architecture competitions. The credit clearly belongs to those who believed in these projects: admiring and faithful clients, stubborn curators and picaresque administrations, which are populated, however, by a great many competent, anonymous public officials, and architects who have resisted the temptation to give up the whole thing before completion.
I think it is important to look at these works firstly as outstanding forms of cultural resistance to a background of indifference regarding quality and an experimental approach to reality. They should also be treated as inexorable signals that in Italy, too, "it can be done", i.e. that urban places can be generated as bearers of a different and problematic way of imagining public space today. The MACRO is one of these concrete examples to be surveyed and understood over the coming years. I say this because it would be gratifying to think that, every now and again, critics and magazines can afford to return to places that were celebrated at their birth, perhaps visiting them with the architect who designed them. This would allow us to check out how real life and people have inhabited, transformed and maybe even disputed the work of architecture which changed the fate of that particular part of a city.
Walking about the scaffolding and spaces as they draw to completion, I like to look at the MACRO as a promise fulfilled, a place that just wants everyday life to let it live and be discussed. The MACRO has always presented itself as a critical and successfully problematical work. It is an expression of the restless talents of the lady "in black", M.me Odile Decq, but also the manifesto-project for a way of openly imagining a contemporary art space that would also be a vital urban fragment in the heart of Rome. I don't think it is easy for anybody to work in the soft and stratified belly of such an ancient city. It is always risky to play with memories, dazzling images, accumulated matter, or visual, literary and sensual references, even for an architect of such talent and conceptual richness as Decq. There is always the danger of wanting to say too much and succumbing to an autobiographical narcissism that can undermine even the best of designs.
But the new MACRO not only gives the impression of being a work that has weathered the long years of its realisation. Above all, this new contemporary urban cog can offer a rich and multifaceted system of spatial experiences that reach beyond the mere system of displaying modern and contemporary art. The determination to maintain the whole museum system as an unstable organism, stiffened by a restless grid of viewpoints, walkways, routes and railed balconies, makes the MACRO an introverted urban place that is primarily an experience of discovery for the visitor.
The entrance immediately states this wealth of routes leading through the rooms and public areas to the roofgarden- restaurant, where the city is suddenly revealed in all its splendour. The museum firstly becomes a place of possible experience, a generous labyrinth multiplying the angles of vision and offering images as alternatives to our traditional viewpoints. The former Peroni brewery has finally opened its fences and let the city into the new museum, with its inward angles and views opening onto the facade, its new roof indicating its changed purpose, and its few and forceful contemporary materials in a dialogue with a carefully restored past. Rather than a mummified industrial icon, the result is a very lively work of contemporary architecture, open and ready to be inhabited.
Luca Molinari
MACRO, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Roma
Architects and artistic direction: "sarl Odile Decq Benoît Cornette – architectes urbanistes – Paris", in collaboration with Burkhard Morass Client: Municipality of Rome
Project architect: Giuseppe Savarese with Frédéric Haesevoets and Valeria Parodi
Renderings: Odile Decq – Labtop Structures: Studio di ingegneria delle strutture, Livorno, with Batiserf, Grenoble
Services and safety: A.I. Studio – A.I. Engineering,Turin
Works management: Zètema Progetto Cultura s.r.l. General contractor: Consorzio Cooperative Costruzioni, with allocation to Cooperativa di Costruzioni
Furnishings contractor: CLM – Centro Lavorazioni Metalli
Built area: 7,000 m2 (foyer, exhibition rooms lecture hall, art video, art cafe, restaurant, artist studio, artwork storage, goods storage, carpenter's workshop), 3,000 m2 (roof terrace), 5,000 m2 (car park)
Design period: 2001 – 2003
Construction period: 2004 – 2010