MAXXI

Listen for a moment. The traffic of Via Flaminia fades behind you. Ahead, the piazza opens up, wide and pale, and the sound changes. Footsteps carry. Children run along low concrete ledges. Somewhere a skateboard clicks over a seam in the paving. Then your eye moves upward, to a long grey shape. It does not sit still the way buildings usually do. It bends, it stretches, and at one end it reaches out over your head as if it wanted to leave the ground.

This is MAXXI. The name is short for the National Museum of Twenty-First Century Arts. It belongs to the Italian state, and it opened to the public in 2010. That matters in a city like Rome. Here most monuments are measured in centuries, sometimes in millennia. MAXXI was one of the first major national institutions in Italy built specifically for the art and architecture of our own time. Rome, the city of ruins, decided to make room for the present.

The building came from an international design competition at the end of the 1990s. The winner was Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect. At that time she was known more for bold drawings than for finished buildings. Many people thought her ideas were impossible to construct. MAXXI became one of her first great completed works. In the year it opened, it won the Stirling Prize, the top award for architecture in Britain. It was the first time Hadid received that prize.

Now look at the ground under your feet and around the edges of the site. This land was not empty before the museum. It was a military complex, a set of army barracks with workshops and long low buildings. Here is a detail many visitors miss. Hadid did not erase the past entirely. One of the old barracks buildings still stands at the edge of the site. Its brick and plaster look modest next to the curving concrete. The contrast is deliberate. The old and the new share the same ground.

Hadid often described her idea for MAXXI with an image of flowing lines rather than a single box. Think of streams, or of tracks crossing and overlapping. The galleries are long bands that run across the site. They slide over and under each other. They split apart and come back together. From the piazza you can follow these bands with your eyes. Notice how few right angles there are, and how the walls seem to turn corners without ever stopping.

The main material is exposed concrete. Walk closer and touch it if you can. The surface is smooth and cool, with a soft grey colour that changes with the weather. On a bright Roman afternoon it looks almost white. Under clouds it turns darker, closer to the colour of wet stone. Pouring curved concrete walls of this length and smoothness was a serious challenge for the builders. The calm surface you see now hides a great deal of engineering work.

Look up at the far end of the building, above the piazza. One gallery juts out into the air, held up by slim columns. At its tip there is a large window. From inside, visitors look out across the square and towards the neighbourhood. From outside, you look up at them. It is a small exchange between the museum and the street. The building watches the city, and the city watches back.

When you step inside, the first surprise is the lobby. It rises through the full height of the building. Black staircases cross the space in long diagonal lines. They seem to hang in the air, and in a way they do. They connect the galleries at different levels, and they invite you to wander rather than follow a fixed route. Many visitors stop here simply to look up. The staircases are as much a part of the exhibition as anything hung on a wall.

The second surprise is the light. Hadid wanted the galleries to use daylight from above. The roof is made largely of glass, with long fins and louvres running along it. These control the sunlight and soften it before it reaches the art. Watch the walls as you move through the rooms. The light shifts as clouds pass over Rome. On some days the galleries feel bright and open. On others they feel quiet and grey, almost like a cloister.

Inside, MAXXI is really two museums under one roof. One part focuses on contemporary art. The other focuses on architecture, which is unusual for a national museum. Exhibitions change regularly, so what you see today may be gone in a few months. The museum also holds a permanent collection, which it shows in rotation. Talks, film screenings and performances fill the calendar too. The building was designed for change, and the programme follows that idea.

The piazza outside is not only an entrance. It is a public space in its own right. You do not need a ticket to sit here. Local families come in the evening. Students from the neighbourhood meet on the steps and ledges. In summer the square sometimes hosts installations, concerts or outdoor events. For a city where many great spaces are fenced or ticketed, this open ground feels generous. It makes the museum part of daily life in Flaminio.

The Flaminio district itself is worth a moment. It sits just north of the historic centre, inside a bend of the Tiber River. In the twentieth century it became a place for modern buildings. Not far from here stands the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a concert complex designed by Renzo Piano. You will also find sports buildings by the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, known for his elegant concrete roofs. MAXXI joined a neighbourhood that was already used to bold design.

Before you go, turn around once more and take in the whole building. Follow one concrete band from the ground to where it lifts into the air. Notice the old barracks building at the edge, still standing quietly. Listen to the voices in the piazza, the tram somewhere behind you, the wind moving across the open square. In a city full of ancient stone, this is a place made for the present... and you are part of it right now.