Newsweek: Meier Museum In Rome A Lightning Rod For Protesters Against War And America

The building has become a flash point for anti-American sentiment and public disaffection for efforts to modernize the ancient city, which residents, historians and many visitors prefer were left untouched. Visitors have taken to expressing their dissatisfaction in graffiti. MEIER IS A CRIMINAL wrote one visitor in English on a construction tarp. IKEA: NOW SELLING TOILETS AT THE ARA PACIS wrote another in Italian. The site has also become a gathering spot for antiwar and anti-American protestors who point to its lack of regard for its surroundings as a symbol of everything they hate about the United States. According to most Italians interviewed at the site, the modern look is wholly unacceptable in the heart of the Eternal City.

Roman Ruin
A museum meant to celebrate the Eternal City’s antiquity has become a lightning rod for protesters against war and America.

 

Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

Ugly or visionary? Meier’s new museum houses the Ara Pacis

May 18, 2006 - Rome’s historical center is a warm mix of dusty travertine and ochre-hued palazzi overgrown with lush vines and topped by a sea of basilica domes and terra-cotta rooftops. Cobblestone lanes wind around decrepit ruins that have been frozen in time for millennia. Crumbling facades are left to decay—some from blatant neglect and others simply to mark the passage of history. Symmetry and order are foreign concepts. But all of that changed this spring with the unveiling of American architect Richard Meier’s starkly un-Roman museum of the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace)—the first modern building project in the historical center since the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s destructive modernization of the 1930s. Now the characteristic labyrinth of quaint, decaying Rome is interrupted by what looks, at first glance, something like a space-age gas station.

The building has become a flash point for anti-American sentiment and public disaffection for efforts to modernize the ancient city, which residents, historians and many visitors prefer were left untouched. Visitors have taken to expressing their dissatisfaction in graffiti. MEIER IS A CRIMINAL wrote one visitor in English on a construction tarp. IKEA: NOW SELLING TOILETS AT THE ARA PACIS wrote another in Italian. The site has also become a gathering spot for antiwar and anti-American protestors who point to its lack of regard for its surroundings as a symbol of everything they hate about the United States. According to most Italians interviewed at the site, the modern look is wholly unacceptable in the heart of the Eternal City.

That judgment may be harsh, considering that the museum, still ringed with construction paraphernalia and tarpaulin fences, is only half built. When completed in September, the building will house a small auditorium, a 600-piece exhibit space, a fountain wall and a fake obelisk, as well as a rooftop coffee bar and viewing terrace from which the real glories of Rome can be seen. Right now, however, the building is a sterile structure of steel, glass and bleached cement, adorned with the odd block of obligatory travertine marble from Tivoli, tucked between the neoclassic church of St. Rocco, the imperial-age mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus and the traffic-clogged thoroughfare that hugs the Tiber River. Its showcase attraction—Augustus’ ancient altar of peace, one of the most important relief sculptures of its age—is open for viewing at 6.50 euros (about $8.30) a ticket, but most tourists just peer through the glass windows.

It didn’t help that Rome awarded the $24 million public-works contract to a New York architect rather than put the bid up for competition. A public bid, critics say, might have found an Italian designer whose sensibilities could have turned out something slightly more Italian—or at least slightly less American. The ultramodern minimalist design was never publicly debated but instead was approved, along with a slew of other so-called Millennium projects, six years ago behind the closed doors at Rome’s city hall. Since then, protesters have stopped construction more than a dozen times. Outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has called it “a monstrosity.”

At the museum’s partial opening in April, the polite applause of the curious gatherers could not hide their horror at the minimalist addition; many people stood in blatant dismay at the stark site. Nearby, a group of art historians and professors from the local university burned scale-models of the museum and chanted anti-American slogans. Architect Meier told the perplexed crowd, “I think the Ara Pacis symbolizes something about life in Rome moving on into the 21st century. That’s the most important thing for me about the building. I think it’s extremely important that Rome should not become a museum. It should have not only a rich history, but contemporary life as well.”

Barbie Nadeau Visitors express their views via graffiti

Clearly, not everyone agrees. Franco Leone of Calabria brought his 21-year-old daughter, a student of architecture in Rome, to see the site Saturday. “It’s just not in the right context,” he says. “In a city like Rome, you really need to integrate a new building into its ancient surroundings. They have not succeeded in this at all.” Enrica Infunti of La Spezia agrees. “It’s really horrible,” she says. “The meaning and the beauty of the Ara Pacis has been abandoned. Now it’s hidden here inside this cold, open structure. Where’s the warmth of Rome here? It has such negative energy.”

The city of Rome hired Meier, ironically, to overcome thousands of years of animosity toward the altar. Built between 13 and 9 B.C. to commemorate the peaceful times Emperor Augustus brought to his Romans, it has been pillaged, moved and rebuilt several times. In the late 1930s, Mussolini gathered together its many fragments, which had been scattered throughout the city, and rebuilt the altar in its current location next to Augustus’ mausoleum, where Mussolini had himself intended to be interred. He embraced the Ara Pacis as a symbol of his fascist regime and until his fall, it symbolized his grandiose dreams of global domination. For much of the 20th century, Italians were indifferent, and only foreign tourists and historians visited the site. Rome’s former mayor, Francesco Rutelli, commissioned Meier to build an appropriate museum around it to reinvigorate interest in the monument’s original Augustan history. “I wanted to make it a public destination, a new piazza space in Rome that people can come to whether they’re going to the museum or not, and just sit in the sun,” Meier says. “It’s bringing life to what was not a vital or active area before.” He’s succeeded in bringing Italians together—mainly in protest.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.