National Centre for Contemporary Arts

This exhibition goes beyond the confines of a sample architecture's exhibition and illustrates the entire works of an artist, Zaha Hadid, who has condensed the salient features of her creativity in a vast range of activities which include design, furniture and theatre sets.
The exhibition is being held in the temporarily refurbished premises in Via Guido Reni, where the Centro Nazionale per le Arti Contemporanee, designed by no other than Zaha Hadid, the winner of the international competition, will soon be taking shape.


The Hadid project, now in its final stages, has been true to its original premises, losing none of the powerful expressive force which took it to victory in the competition. The fluid, communicative design reverberates with all the dynamic impact of the great works of Baroque Rome, taking up their enveloping spaces in a play on concave and convex contrasts.
The expressive power of this building thus communicates most eloquently with the historical heritage of Rome.
At the same time, the way the project has developed provides a clear response to some inferences about supposed construction difficulties since, as can immediately be seen in the sections, the load-bearing structure unfolds with surprising simplicity.

One need only take a look at the initial sketches for the Rome building to see how Zaha did not base her work, as has been stated, on a deconstructive methodology - in other words by disassembling, dismantling, and demolishing. On the contrary, she has worked more with an expressionist logic to assemble and coordinate the lines of force and flow, and bursts of energy, which take their cue from existing urban alignments and traverse the new construction giving form to the buildings. As a result, the new volumes interact with the square-cut mesh of the Flaminio district, breaking down its repetitive modularity.
As Zaha herself explains in the long interview published in this catalogue, the site in this project really does become an integral part of the city. One might say that the project opens up urban itineraries which lie dormant in the surrounding area. Each shift in the field is correlated to its context. The city flows inwards, while the project flows outwards.
This leads to considerable permeability between the project and the district. The ground floor of the museum complex is only partially built up, creating the empty, open spaces of a campus. This ensemble of openings and passageways will provide direct access from Via Guido Reni to Via Masaccio: a new itinerary which will constitute a new feature for the surrounding area.

All this will provide a further contribution to the current state of transformation in the district, which is now becoming a sort of museum showcase for the contemporary architecture in which Zaha Hadid's complex will be in visual contact with Renzo Piano's Auditorium, with the future headquarters of the adjacent Italian Space Agency by Massimiliano Fuksas, as well as with in that anthology of architectural excellence which was created by Nervi, Libera and Moretti in the 1960s.
The Foro Italico complex, just over the river, rounds out this documentary history of 20th-century architecture.
All the elements are in place to let us assert that a new season in Roman - but also Italian - architecture is taking shape after long being confined between an ambitious but nihilist intellectual tension, and a form of deregulation without quality which has had a negative impact on the environment and townscapes of Italy.

The ethical weight which emerges from this excerpt from Zaha Hadid's interview is, I believe, particularly significant and encouraging:

"...It's a matter of giving life to a space which, in a whole variety of ways, offers people pleasure, fun, comfort and well-being... The basic problem is really that of adding something to our lives."

* Director General for Architecture and Contemporary Art