At a press conference a short while ago, Giovanna Melandri, President of the MAXXI Foundation, presented the ambitious new project for the National Museum of 21st Century Arts. Created during the months of closure caused by the pandemic, the Rome-based cultural institution wants to present itself as a new international reference point, born out of a period of syndemic crisis.
“In its first ten years, MAXXI has grown, it has transformed, it has become a device for research, training, experimentation,” Melandri explained during the presentation. “We have learned a lot in the years of the pandemic, bringing our content to the digital world and strengthening the museum’s educational and social function. Now is the time for a natural and further evolution, in the name of urban regeneration, sustainability and the most advanced technologies, to confront the new world that must emerge from the syndemic, environmental, social and health crisis and become even more a laboratory of the future”.
With this project, MAXXI is a candidate for the New European Bauhaus program launched by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. It is no coincidence that the project’s key words are sustainability, inclusion, and innovation - the same words used by PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan).
GRANDE MAXXI will be developed in a series of integrated actions involving both the building designed by Zaha Hadid and Piazza Alighiero Boetti and an adjacent area pertaining to the museum: MAXXI Sustainable, which will involve the energy conversion of the main building including through the installation of photovoltaic panels on the existing roofs; MAXXI Green, the creation of an area of equipped, productive green space for public use in the area in front of the museum; MAXXI Accessible and Intelligent, the removal of physical and sensory barriers and digital upgrades; and finally MAXXI HUB, the realisation of a new sustainable and multifunctional building. This last point, the most important, will see the construction of a new building, in an area overlooking Via Masaccio, adjacent to Piazza Alighiero Boetti to which it will be connected, on two levels and with a practicable green roof.
The Innovation Hub - the subject of an international ideas competition - is described as a research and development hub in which the most qualified skills in the world of art, architecture, and creativity will “work together with the scientific community to develop ideas, visions, solutions, urban regeneration projects combining data, information technology, and creativity.”
Opening image: MAXXI, Museo Nazionale Delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome. Photo Musacchio Ianniello