MAXXI Historical Timeline

A competition won in 1998, a building that took more than a decade, and four fifths of the design that never happened.

Chronology

1. 1998 — an international design competition for the museum building is won by Zaha Hadid. Her submission comprises five separate structures. Structural impact: the scheme that is approved is far larger than the one that gets built. What you see today: circulation that reads as a fragment, because it is one.
2. late 1990s — the site chosen is a former military barracks, the Caserma Montello. Structural impact: parts of the barracks are incorporated into the new building rather than cleared. What you see today: the older masonry that the Hadid forms run up against, which is the reason the complex is not free-standing.
3. 1999–2009 — construction, which takes more than ten years. Structural impact: only one of the five proposed structures is completed. What you see today: the whole of the museum, and four buildings' worth of absence around it.
4. 2010 — MAXXI opens to the public and receives the Stirling Prize for architecture from the Royal Institute of British Architects in the same year. Structural impact: none further; the building is complete as far as it will go. What you see today: a museum that was acclaimed before it had a collection to speak of.
5. 2010 — MAXXI Architecture opens as Italy's first national museum of architecture. Structural impact: half the building is given to a discipline that had never had a national museum here. What you see today: archives and drawings shown as exhibits in their own right rather than as background to art.
6. since 2010 — the permanent collections grow through direct acquisitions, commissions, thematic competitions, awards for young artists, donations and permanent loans. Structural impact: none. What you see today: a collection assembled in living memory, which is why the displays change so much more than elsewhere in Rome.

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