Odile’s museum: a promise kept

The high-gloss roof of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art was conceived by Odile Decq as a promenade linking the late 19th-century surroundings to the enigma of presentday art. Her design crowns the existing building, the old Peroni beer brewery, with a roof terrace that gives visitors the chance to see the city from a new viewpoint.

In the last ten years, a small batch of works “pending” has accumulated in Italy. These paint a good picture of the country, while also attesting to the expectations raised by Italy’s complex cultural condition. The European Library by Bolles+Wilson and the Museum of Cultures by Chipperfield in Milan, the new IUAV headquarters in Venice by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue, the MAXXI by Zaha Hadid, and the MACRO by Odile Decq in Rome are but the visible tip of the iceberg of a very brief season of municipal and ministerial enthusiasm. In the late 1990s that season had launched large-scale international consultations and created a number of new contemporary icons for Italy’s major cities in search of identity. This was very important because it forcefully reintroduced the need for public institutions to let contemporary architecture finally resume its most advanced expressions, in a country that is still clearly not happy with an evolved idea of modern architecture.

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