Ampliamento MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma

The high-gloss roof of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art was conceived by Odile Decq as a promenade linking the late 19th-century surroundings to the enigma of presentday art.

Her design crowns the existing building, the old Peroni beer brewery, with a roof terrace that gives visitors the chance to see the city from a new viewpoint.

The museum’s dominant colour is black – Decq’s favourite. In the restaurant, dark surfaces make a shadowy setting that is illuminated by swathes of light projecting down from arrow-like hanging lamps (“Javelot”) and table lamps (“Ma Lampe”). Both models, produced by Luceplan, were designed by Decq especially for the MACRO.

This new contemporary urban cog can offer a rich and multifaceted system of spatial experiences that reach beyond the mere system of displaying modern and contemporary art. The determination to maintain the whole museum system as an unstable organism, stiffened by a restless grid of viewpoints, walkways, routes and railed balconies, makes the MACRO an introverted urban place that is primarily an experience of discovery for the visitor.

The long, suspended walkway leading to the roof also works as an observation deck over the large exposition hall. This new building has given the MACRO an additional 10,000 square metres, divided into space for art (exhibitions, events and video projections) and space for recreation and study (restaurant, cafe, book shop, reading room and lecture halls).

The entrance immediately states this wealth of routes leading through the rooms and public areas to the roofgarden- restaurant, where the city is suddenly revealed in all its splendour. The museum firstly becomes a place of possible experience, a generous labyrinth multiplying the angles of vision and offering images as alternatives to our traditional viewpoints. The former Peroni brewery has finally opened its fences and let the city into the new museum, with its inward angles and views opening onto the facade, its new roof indicating its changed purpose, and its few and forceful contemporary materials in a dialogue with a carefully restored past. Rather than a mummified industrial icon, the result is a very lively work of contemporary architecture, open and ready to be inhabited.