(jazzy piano music)
Voiceover: We're just north of the center of Rome
looking at Zaha Hadid's relatively new building,
the Maxxi Museum, devoted to 21st century art.
As we approached the museum we walked by military barracks
and we just begin to spot
the concrete facade of the museum
resting gently on the older buildings,
poking its nose around the older buildings.
Until we walked into a large piazza
where the full whiff of the building is apparent.
Voiceover: In some ways it seems to have almost landed
on that older structure.
Voiceover: The fact that it feels like it's landed
suggest weightlessness despite the fact
that it is an almost unbroken slab of concrete
and that's in part because of the shadow
created by the overhang of that
concrete reminiscent of the international style
and the work of people like Le Corbusier
or Mies van der Rohe.
Voiceover: In the facade of the building,
rows of metallic columns that might remind us
of Bernini's piazza at St. Peter's.
Voiceover: There's also the historical precedent
of this concrete material that the ancient Romans perfected
and used to shape space
and she is very much the inheritor of that tradition.
Voiceover: Although we don't see those round arches
like a Roman aqueduct or the Pantheon,
it's almost like those round arches
have tilted and become horizontal
and moved the visitor to the museum
through ribbons of space.
Voiceover: Zaha Hadid has won virtually every major
international architectural price.
Voiceover: She was born in Iraq but is a British architect.
She holds faculty positions at numerous universities
all over the world.
Voiceover: Right after school
she had worked for Rem Koolhaas
at his Office for Metropolitan Architecture.
This was one of the most inventive
and theoretically important architectural firms
in the 1970s and 1980s.
Voiceover: Hadid is clearly drawing inspiration
from modernism, from constructivism,
from the work of the great Russian painters
of the early 20th century like Malevich,
embodying early 20th century Utopianism
about the modern city.
Voiceover: In the warm grace of the concrete,
in the silvery grace of the metal flooring
and in the blacks and whites.
It reminds me of the interest in translucency,
transparency and opaqueness that you see
especially in the work of artists like Moholy-Nagy.
in the early part of the 20th century,
as well as an abashed interest
in the power of pure geometry.
Voiceover: Looking toward Islamic art
as well as modernist architecture.
Voiceover: In fact, she mentions the importance
of having seen the minaret at Samarra.
This massive figure that creates very clean,
stark geometric lines and that creates
a ribbon for people to walk up.
Voiceover: There is that sense of ribbons of space,
that path around the minaret coming undone
and branching out when we walk
through the spaces of the museum.
There is something very exciting
about moving through this building
and not knowing what one will come across next.
No matter which galleries we go into,
we're drawn back to this fabulous stairways
that are black but lit underneath with white light.
Voiceover: We're walking on metal grids
and this entire interior space seems to be a contrast
between this wonderful curvilinear ribbons
and strict rectilinear geometries.
Voiceover: We see those rectilinear geometries
in the walls withe the blocks of concrete,
in the stairs and in the concrete beams
that almost read these blades along the ceiling.
Voiceover: Our eye shoots along those beams
and are slowed only by the thins of the louvers.
Voiceover: The stairways move like bends
in and around those rectilinear shapes
and feel very playful.
Voiceover: The staircase is not only bend
but also double back creating sharp angles.
They do feel playful, almost as if
you could have a huge metal ball
that runs along as if they were a track.
There's also a hint of the sinister
and at least one critic has likened it
to the Prince of Piranesi
in the way that they seem to move in every direction
with endless multiplication.
Voiceover: Of different spaces weaving together
and going back out again.
Voiceover: Sometimes rushing from one space to another
and sometimes slowing down.
Voiceover: The architect said, and I'm quoting here,
"My first idea was about a delta where the mainstreams
become the galleries and minor ones
become bridges which connect to them."
Of course, a delta is a river
that forks and flows into the sea.
Voiceover: What does it mean to design
a museum in the 21st century?
If you think about the history of museums,
they're generally palaces that have been re-purposed.
For example, the Leuven, Paris which was
the royal residence of the King fo France
or here in Rome, the Vatican Museum is the Papal palace.
Voiceover: You could think about many of the palazzi in Rome
that were once family palaces that are now museums.
Voiceover: The Barberini Palace, for example.
Voiceover: We could think about
the early modernist architecture
of the Museum of Modern Art.
Museum architecture says a lot about
how we see ourselves and how we see our cultural heritage
and how we move into the future.
Do we look to the past?
Do we look forward?
Voicover: That's an especially salient issue here in Rome.
A city with an overwhelming history.
[jazzy piano music]