A contest to blend Rome's controversial new home for the Ara Pacis with its surroundings has generated huge interest a few weeks after it was unveiled, Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said Thursday.
"We've already received 48 expressions of interest. That is a huge response," the centre-left official said.
Piqued by criticism that Richard Meier's ultra-modern museum had closed off Emperor Augustus's famed altar of peace rather than linking it with the emperor's nearby tomb, Veltroni called a competition soon after Meier's building was unveiled in April.
"The fantastic response is testimony of the architectural world's great interest in the spot," the mayor said. He said the once-neglected area on the Tiber would only have a "fully organic character" when new links to the tomb, an underpass to the river, and softer-edged solutions to mediate between Meier and the surrounding Baroque have been put in place.
However, Veltroni's announcement only served as fresh ammunition for the critics of the Meier building. "The interest only goes to show how much better it would have been if we had had an open tender 10 years ago rather than a grand commission by (Veltroni's predecessor, now Culture Minister Francesco) Rutelli," said Fabio Rampelli of the rightist National Alliance (AN).
Unfortunately, he said, the terms of the new competition would no longer be dictated by the spare glass Fascist-era monument case AN long campaigned to preserve, but by "a hypermodern box," a "Martian work that was chosen without a scrap of competition". "It's out of this world - in the cradle of urban civilisation, the standard-bearer of architectural excellence, houses are built from the top down".
AN's mayoral candidate who was defeated by Veltroni in May had pledged to dump Meier's work in the suburbs. The sleek stone-and-glass complex - central Rome's first piece of modern architecture since Fascist days - was unveiled on Rome's legendary birth date of April 21 after a turbulent decade of polemics and alterations.
Mayor Veltroni, a jazz-loving ex-Communist cinephile who has pledged to renew Rome's skyline, had championed Meier's
modernist showcase since his first election five years ago. But it met with fierce opposition from conservatives. Controversial art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, culture undersecretary from 2001 to 2003, burned a model of the building, urged art students to bomb it and punned that Meier was set on turning the Ara Pacis into a 'bara Pacis' (coffin of peace).
He said Meier, 71, "knows Rome the way I know Tibet".
Italian 'name' architects cited the work as an example of alleged moves to 'Los Angelise' Rome. Others muttered the relatively simple original design has morphed into a grandiose complex eight times bigger than what it was replacing.
Media critics were split, with some hailing it as a welcome piece of understated modernism in a florid Baroque city, and others as wholly out of step with its surroundings. Some Romans had no trouble saying what they thought about the project right from the start.
Even when it was in its infancy, and the Meier 'box' could only be glimpsed through corrugated iron sheets and scaffolding, they smeared the site with graffiti calling it a phonebox, gas station and "cesso" - the most vulgar Italian
word for toilet.
The unveiled building has already been tarnished with another paint smear branding it a "boiata" (roughly, "crud"
or "dross".)
Some of the marble and travertine has also been scuffed and scratched.
Meier is not the only modern architect called by Veltroni to add modern touches to the ancient city. Several of his contemporaries have already been busy in Rome's suburbs. Renzo Piano, one of the high priests of modernism, unveiled his Auditorium concert centre in 2002.
The building has been credited with shifting Roman attitudes to contemporary building. British-Iraqi Zaha Hadid is putting up a modern art gallery, Maxxi, about a kilometre north of the old city walls while Massimiliano Fuksas has designed a convention centre for the south of the city.
Unbeknownst to many, Meier already has another Rome work under his belt - a 2003 church about six miles from the city
centre which has met with acclaim from locals and critics. A recipient of architecture's prime laurel, the Pritzker Prize, in 1985, Meier is perhaps best known for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
His other credits include Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art and Frankfurt's Museum of the Arts.
