3. On Bilbao
The MAXXI competition was organized shortly after the completion of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. It may have been to soon to tell if the “Bilbao Effect” would work for Rome, but the potential for a spectacular project by a world-renowned architect to regenerate cultural interest (and economic activity) in the city must not have gone unnoticed. Though I don’t know the politics, I think Rome must have felt a tinge of jealousy as 90s/00s “starchitecture” largely bypassed the Eternal City, and the completion of the MAXXI does feel a bit late, at such an ostentatious construction seems to belong to an era before last year’s financial collapse.