The MAXXI architecture collection

The Biennale invites the MAXXI architecture collection.

MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, is the first Italian national institution devoted to contemporary creativity. The programming of the activities – exhibitions, workshops, conferences, shows, projections, educational projects – reflects MAXXI’s vocation as a place for the conservation and exhibition of its collections but also, and above all, a laboratory for cultural experimentation and innovation, for the study, research and production of the aesthetic contents of our time.The MAXXI building is a major architectural work designed by Zaha Hadid, located in Rome’s Flaminio quarter and featuring innovative and spectacular forms.

Although the collection at the Frac Centre-Val de Loire is often presented as a voyage through utopia, which over time has been able to create a theoretical basis for thought, the collections at MAXXI, however, tell of a concrete utopia, one which has actually been built and considered in post-war Italy. An Italy that believed in its future, where architecture was to play a key role in the country’s social, cultural, and political transformation.

The contrast with the Italy of today is quite clear, and it is extremely useful for evaluating the era in which we live, compared to eras where architecture was isolated from the surrounding world and incapable of producing visionary work. These landscapes occupy and construct opposing desires; on one hand, the dream of an anonymous architecture that anyone can build without rules, and on the other, a visionary thought that could transform the dream into something that is actually possible, if only the situation was different and if only architecture was still respected in Italy.