Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Rischio di aborto per il Museo di Arti Moderne di Roma - The Independent

Rischia di abortire il progetto di Museo delle Arti del XXI° secolo. 
Grazie Berlusca!
Am.
Another setback for famous architect whose buildings tend not to get off 
ground
By Peter Popham in Rome
22 January 2005
She was famous for years as the avant-garde architect whose visionary 
works remained firmly glued to her drawing board.
Amazing designs had flown from her imagination for more than two 
decades: she had sealed her reputation as one of the most distinctive 
talents, had beaten the world's best with winning entries for the 
Cardiff Opera House and an exclusive club on the Peak of Hong Kong. But 
nothing got built. For years, the only Zaha Hadid building was a strange 
little fire station with a roof like a paper dart in northern Germany.
That's all history now. Without diluting her ideas, Hadid, born and 
raised in Iraq but based in London since her student days, is 
accumulating a tidy collection of real buildings. The Rosenthal Centre 
for Contemporary Art in Cincinnatti is up. Works in Germany, France, 
Italy and Taiwan are all in progress. And she has just won the 
competition to design a new building for the Architecture Foundation 
near Tate Modern in London.
But a recurrence of her old problem has loomed with news that one of the 
biggest and most ambitious buildings of her career, already on site in 
Rome, is about to run out of money.
Maxxi, the Italian acronym for Rome's new museum of 21st century art, is 
as revolutionary as anything that has emerged from her pen. Occupying 
the site of an old army barracks in the Flaminio district north of the 
centre, it is not so much a building as some glass-and-steel worms 
slithering over each other.
Maxxi is intended to put Rome on the map as a city that takes modern art 
seriously. Choosing Hadid, who last year won the Pritzker Prize, the 
most prestigious architectural award, underlined the importance of the 
project.
Since Mussolini, who promoted new architecture, Italy has been slow to 
grasp the challenge of energising its cities with good new buildings. 
Instead, it has thrown a girdle of dreary high-rise estates round its 
cities. Now Rome and some other cities are trying to show that they are 
on the same wavelength as the rest of western Europe, and perhaps bolder 
than most in their commissioning.
The new museum, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture but partially 
financed by the Ministry of Infrastructure, is budgeted at ¤60m (£32m), 
and the first tranche of ¤15m has already been delivered and largely 
spent. Behind the exterior wall of the old barracks, which Hadid 
retained in her design and which is now being supported by scaffolding, 
the foundations are nearly complete.
"We're working flat out," Claudio Cerasi, head of the SAC, the main 
contractor, told La Repubblica: "We're about to start on the first 
level. It's a complex work, using a very unusual type of cladding and 
delicate materials. We've got at least a year and a half's work ahead of 
us. But if the next instalment of money doesn't arrive within a month, 
we'll be forced to down tools."
With economic growth at a standstill for many months, cuts in the 
Ministry of Culture's budget have been feared since last year. In 
August, the Minister of Culture, Giuliano Urbani, warned that a rumoured 
reduction of his budget by 25 per cent would "cut into cultural assets 
in a heavy and indiscriminate fashion."
But if Maxxi's building site were to go dark, it would throw a shadow 
over Mr Urbani's reputation. Gianluca Racana, Hadid's project architect, 
told The Independent: "The materials we are using for the museum are 
high-tech and cannot be left in the open indefinitely or they will 
deteriorate. In particular there is the roofing material, already 
ordered, made of crystal ... the car's in motion now. We can't afford to 
put on the brakes."
The arrival of the next instalment of ¤15m, due by the end of February, 
is awaited anxiously. Last night, a spokesman for the Ministry of 
Culture said: "There are some problems with financing Maxxi. But we do 
not intend to abandon the project."
Claudio Cerasi sighed: "I ask myself if this building is ever going to 
get finished."
 
22 January 2005 06:28
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 Rischia di abortire
E da quanto tempo era incinta? :)
*LOL*
-Stefano