A renewal at the heart of the museum with a new set- up of the permanent Collection
An exhibition dedicated to those artistic paths that seek another dimension, of absolute, between universal, material and immaterial, immanent and transcendent.
40 years on from his death, MAXXI is dedicating a major retrospective to him that studies and presents his versatility, starting out with an account of his architecture.
The Basilicata Museum Complex and MAXXI, in collaboration with the 2019 Matera-Basilicata Foundation, present two new video works by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.
A review that ranges from the low-cost housing projects of the post-war years to new experimental and sustainable ways of inhabiting the planet
A necessary tribute to a great artist who created a language in relational art made of sensitivity, local tradition and global codes.
A public art project set in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo to celebrate the universal event of birth, moving a sudden and sincere emotion.
Altan’s entire world told through original drawings, posters, illustrations, paintings, sketches, tables, books and videos.
A new focus presentation of the MAXXI archives this time featuring a great photographer
«Painting recognises no customs. Children do not know gender. Art hates painters».
A cinematographic animation project that starts on paper to transform into a collective and participatory art performance.
The first event in the major review "Doc Home", organized in collaboration with Art Doc Festival and on the occasion of the exhibition "At Home. Designs for contemporary living".
Three meetings to retrace the activity of one of the greatest photographers of our time.
From Lucio Fontana to Piero Guccione. Sgarbi pursues beauty among extraordinary discoveries and venerated masters.
Un percorso guidato gratuito ad alcune gallerie del Museo a cura degli ospiti dell’Istituto di riabilitazione Leonarda Vaccari.
Fifty years after the "spring in which the streets and squares of our country resounded with freedom", that concept, cultivated by the baby boomer generation, is at risk of collapse.
TUESDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
WEDNESDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
THURSDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
FRIDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
SATURDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
SUNDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
The ticket office is open until 1 hour before Museum closing.
CLOSING DAYS
Every Monday, 1 May, 25 December
24 DECEMBER 11:00 am – 5:30 pm
31 DECEMBER 11:00 – 5:30 pm
6 JANUARY 11:00 – 8:00 pm
MONDAY closed
TUESDAY and THURSDAY 8:00 am – 8:00 pm
WEDNESDAY and FRIDAY 8:00 am – 7:30 pm
SATURDAY and SUNDAY 9:00 am – 7:30 pm
MONDAY closed
TUESDAY to THURSDAY 11:00 am – 00:00 am
FRIDAY and SATURDAY 11:00 am – 2:00 am
SUNDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
for young people of between 14 and up to 25 years of age; for groups of at least 15 people and affiliated groups; accredited journalists with a valid press pass; FAI – Fondo Ambiente Italiano members; holders of Bibliocard – Biblioteche di Roma; holders of entrance tickets for the Museo Ebraico of Rome; holders of entrance tickets for La Galleria Nazionale; Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti members; Associazione Italiana Ambasciatori del Gusto members and relatives; holders of Pro Loco membership card.
for all members of families composed of two adults and at least one child (free for under-14s).
every Tuesday, access the museum at a reduced price, thanks to Enel . Valid until 8 March, on the occasion of “on the spiritual matter of art” exhibition.
for “last hour” admissions from 5:30 pm (Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday) and from 6:30 pm (Tuesday, Friday and Saturday); Wednesday from 2:00 PM for Italian and European Union high school and university students – subject to the showing of personal student cards or documents, students (o9ver 14 years of age) for class groups (second level secondary schools) acquiring MAXXI educational activities; for entrance to videogallery screenings (free with the purchase of a full or reduced price entrance ticket).
valid for two entrances on two consecutive days.
valid for exhibition entrance at Extra MAXXI.
valid for museum entrance and Extra MAXXI.
for young people between 14 and up to 25 years of age; for groups of at least 15 people and affiliated groups; accredited journalists with a valid press pass; FAI – Fondo Ambiente Italiano members; holders of Bibliocard – Biblioteche di Roma; holders of entrance tickets for the Museo Ebraico of Rome; holders of entrance tickets for La Galleria Nazionale; Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti members; Associazione Italiana Ambasciatori del Gusto members and relatives; holders of Pro Loco membership card.
present a ticket to the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia and access the MAXXI at a reduced price. Furthermore, by presenting a MAXXI ticket at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, you will have access to € 7 instead of 10. Valid until March 8, on the occasion of the exhibition “on the spiritual matter of art”.
under 14 years old, disabled visitors requiring accompaniment, companions of disabled visitors, MiBAC employees, European Union tour guides and couriers, 1 teacher for every 10 students, ICOM members, AMACI members, accredited journalists, MAXXI membership card holder; from Tuesday to Friday, free admittance for academics and university researchers in Art and Architecture; on your Birthday; for entrance to the permanent collection, from Tuesday to Thursday; for women on 8 March.
Click here for more information
The collections of the MAXXI art present themselves as a strong nucleus that witnesses the national and international artistic production
The MAXXI Architettura collections comprise all those artefacts and documents that, in various ways, represent the material and conceptual complexity of architecture.
The Centro Archivi curates and manages the MAXXI's architecture collections and provides the possibility, inside the Sala Studio, to directly consult the documents and database of its twentieth and twenty-first century collections.
Donate your Cinque per Mille to the MAXXI Foundation
TUESDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
WEDNESDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
THURSDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
FRIDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
SATURDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
SUNDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
The ticket office is open until 1 hour before Museum closing.
CLOSING DAYS
Every Monday, 1 May, 25 December
24 DECEMBER 11:00 am – 5:30 pm
31 DECEMBER 11:00 – 5:30 pm
6 JANUARY 11:00 – 8:00 pm
MONDAY closed
TUESDAY and THURSDAY 8:00 am – 8:00 pm
WEDNESDAY and FRIDAY 8:00 am – 7:30 pm
SATURDAY and SUNDAY 9:00 am – 7:30 pm
MONDAY closed
TUESDAY to THURSDAY 11:00 am – 00:00 am
FRIDAY and SATURDAY 11:00 am – 2:00 am
SUNDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
gallery 5
curated by Maristella Casciato, Fulvio Irace with Margherita Guccione, Salvatore Licitra, Francesca Zanella
Architect, designer, art director, writer, poet, critic and all-round artist, Gio Ponti has been the object of historical-critical literature and exhibition programmes that would be difficult to equal.
From the styling of everyday objects to the invention of spatial configurations for the modern home through to the realisation of complex projects inserted within an urban context such as the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan or the cathedral in Taranto, Ponti’s design was characterised by his comfort in switching scales. Produced in collaboration with the CSAC of Parma and Gio Ponti Archives, the exhibition presents archive materials, models, photographs, books, magazine and objects that permit the discovery of a remarkable protagonist of Italian architecture who left an indelible mark on diverse continents.
Photo: Gio Ponti, Cocathedral of Taranto 1964/70 © Gio Ponti Archives
TUESDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
WEDNESDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
THURSDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
FRIDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
SATURDAY 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
SUNDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
The ticket office is open until 1 hour before Museum closing.
CLOSING DAYS
Every Monday, 1 May, 25 December
24 DECEMBER 11:00 am – 5:30 pm
31 DECEMBER 11:00 – 5:30 pm
6 JANUARY 11:00 – 8:00 pm
MONDAY closed
TUESDAY and THURSDAY 8:00 am – 8:00 pm
WEDNESDAY and FRIDAY 8:00 am – 7:30 pm
SATURDAY and SUNDAY 9:00 am – 7:30 pm
MONDAY closed
TUESDAY to THURSDAY 11:00 am – 00:00 am
FRIDAY and SATURDAY 11:00 am – 2:00 am
SUNDAY 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
The research of a definition of the exact house, or better the house that would be suitable to the life of those who dwell in it, the modern life of modern humans, was always central in Ponti’s production. His research started from the typical Milanese Domus, i.e. from the origins of domestic tradition, developed through the pages of the magazines Ponti directed, “Domus” and “Stile”, and found its conclusion in Ponti’s apartment in Via Dezza – with its fluid spaces and visually connected rooms. A variety of types applicable to standardized lodgings can be found as early as the models designed for Feal, where adaptability was conjugated with the prefabrication of tower buildings.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Placed at the centre of Ponti’s design creativity, Nature establishes a biunivocal and osmotic relation with architecture. This is manifest when Ponti uses porticoes, terraces, pergolas and verandas, loggias and balconies as architectural elements that project architecture outside, and at the same time bring nature within. For Ponti, Nature par excellence reveals itself along the coasts of the Mediterranean, the cradle of classic architecture but also of modern architecture, as expressed by the projects studied with Bernard Rudofsky between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. During the 1970s and 1960s, the relationship between architecture and nature became more conceptual and took form in more organic and almost intimate projects, such as the house called Beetle under the leaf and the villa for Daniel Koo in California.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
The 1930s were a period which offered Ponti the opportunity to experiment with large projects, mostly on public procurement, characterised by a multi-scale vision, capable of integrating the urban dimension with the that of details. In the competition project for the Palazzo dell’Acqua e della Luce for the E42, in the university seats of Liviano and Palazzo del Bo in Padua, and in the School of Mathematics at Rome’s Città Universitaria, besides establishing a dialogue between architecture and art, Ponti started from the monumental scale and moved down to the design of interior spaces and furnishings. A similar method guided him in the design of the First Montecatini Building in Milan, undeniably a monument to labour, replicated and reiterated twenty years later with the Second Building.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Projects such as the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm or the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Sao Paulo in Brazil represent the accomplished expression of a design concept that reasons through planes rather than volumes. The façade becomes a two-dimensional surface that can be punctuated and folded as a sheet of paper. In the villas built in Caracas and Teheran, also thanks to the wealthy and enlightened clients, Ponti lightens the casing which detaches itself from the ground and reveals all his ability to handle complex plans, in which the domestic spaces follow one another and merge, with furnishing solutions and artistic interventions integrated into the architecture. These projects also attest to the international dimension that Ponti’s work had reached in the 1950s.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Ponti’s most telling and well known aphorism expresses the idea that the “finished form” is a guarantee of a correct architecture: It is not volume that makes architecture, but its closed, finished, immutable form. Archi- tecture […] when it is pure, is pure as a crystal, magic, closed, exclusive, autonomous, uncontaminated, incorrupt, absolute, definitive. The faceted essence of the crystal manifests itself in the plan, with an elusive profile made of corners that multiply and chase each other without ever finding the absoluteness of two perpendicular faces, and in perforated and suspended surfaces that are the elevations of those plans. A consistent and univocal method that we find in impressive projects such as the Denver Art Museum or the chapel of San Carlo in Milan, and in the small scale design of door handles for Olivari, of bathroom fixtures for Ideal Standard, of ceramic tiles or the bodywork for a car called, not by chance, Diamante (Diamond).
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
The history of mankind, Ponti argued, advances from the heavy to the light, from the thick to the thin: the prophecy of “lightness” called for the advent of “a light and transparent style, simple, linked to a simplified social custom”. For Ponti, lightness is not a literary metaphor, but the answer to twentieth-century ways of building, with an ethical value rather than a formal one. The facades of the buildings are therefore “intact surfaces, they are like the sheet of white paper” on which the windows start the “arcane game of Architecture” which dematerializes as in the final outcome of the Con-cathedral of Taranto, where the cement becomes air and light. Even in studies on prefabrication, in Ina and Savoia office buildings in Milan or in government buildings in Islamabad, the game of perforated facades defeats the repetitiveness.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Ponti’s aspiration towards lightness translated into and aspiration for verticality when applied to buildings that were to be inserted in a consolidated urban context. A vertical development, in fact, allows a limited footprint and allowed Ponti to foretell the appearance of skyscrapers in the skyline of modern cities. In his design of high-rise buildings, the plan remains, however, a finite form, closed and absolutely original. In his study of triangular-plan skyscrapers, the plan is functional to a multiplication of continuous window views, and a similar choice of light façades permeates the design for the Montreal Towers and that for the Italo-Brazilian Centre in Sao Paulo. However, Ponti’s skyscraper par excellence is the Pirelli Tower in Milan, a synthesis of many design themes presented in this exhibition.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
On an urban planning level, Ponti developed an idea of the city that is intimately linked to the vertical development of architecture. He demonstrated this already in 1937 with the regeneration project of the former Scalo Sempione, where he fought against the concept of a horizontal garden district in favour of an organic composition of large ensembles placed along a wide tree-lined avenue, which ten years later (when he worked on the project once more with Mazzocchi and Minoletti) became the “Green River”, a backbone with sports facilities and tall collective buildings. Even on the small scale of a mountain town, Chiavenna, his proposal for a “School City” reflects the organic vision of an education district integrated into the fabric of the historical centre.
Foto © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini
Focusing on the potential of welding between past and present, the exhibition is enriched by a new photographic project: a series of contemporary glances on eight of Ponti’s designs, here placed in an emotional and intellectual short circuit with modern forms of creativity. On display, photos by Stefano Graziani, Allegra Martin, Michele Nastasi, Filippo Romano, Paolo Rosselli, Giovanni Silva and Delfino Sisto Legnani.