Building Babel in Rome: Zaha Hadid's MAXXI

This paper begins by framing Zaha Hadid's MAXXI—Italy's national museum of 21st-century arts—as both an expression of the ideals and models that informed Rome's urban renovation at the turn of the millennium and a somewhat contradictory example of the simultaneous proliferation of cultural institutions across Europe—what French art historian Jean Clair called "a grey mantle of museums," echoing Raul Glaber's metaphor of a white mantle of churches spreading over medieval Europe. Built on the site of early-20th-century military barracks, Hadid's design retained only two of the existing buildings, preserving their masonry shells, plaster facades, tiled roofs, and cast-iron frames. The lobby and main galleries unfold within a new cluster of curved, longitudinal volumes that trace the western edge of the plot, with exhibition spaces stacked and grafted at varying heights and angles. From the outside, one can only guess at building's shape and internal layout. This "opacity" is not resolved upon entry—if anything, the sense of disorientation is intensified. Hadid herself described MAXXI as an "overchanging event in space": a work of architecture not meant to be grasped at once but gradually revealed through exploration. Only one reference was explicitly cited by the architect for this project: Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim in New York (1959). In Hadid's view, the visitor's journey of MAXXI—funneled along longitudinal galleries arranged in a quasi-ascensional sequence—mirrored, in reverse, the spatial logic of Wright's descending ramp. Both designs were structured around movement: a spiraling path in New York and a fragmented progression in Rome. Both rejected the supposed neutrality of the "white cube" in favor of a highly connotated exhibition space. And both served the needs of artists and curators while simultaneously challenging them to adapt and respond to architecture.