Last weekend, Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI museum in Rome opened to the public. This two-day “architecture preview” proved so popular that museum administrators had to extend the event to a second weekend, and I was quick enough to reserve a ticket for round two.
For the past week, the architecture blogosphere (twitterverse?) has been flooded with critiques of the building, each blogger/journalist/theorist trying desperately to put the MAXXI in context. Nicolai Ouroussoff casts Zaha Hadid as a modern-day Bernini – bonding with an “ecstatic” Pope over caffè – making plans to transform the Eternal City (for the better). Aaron Betsky (channeling Mark Wigley) sees the work as an “instant ruin,” the “spatial magnificence” of the empty galleries providing as good a lesson to would-be architects as the fragmentary remains of antiquity. Rowan Moore (of The Architects Journal UK) attempts to place the MAXXI in Hadid’s oeuvre.