The interior of the museum is functional and beautiful, quintessential Meier, indirectly lit from above by a series of saw- tooth skylights which gives the space an even glow. Well-detailed louvres shade the Ara Pacis on the large fully glazed east and west walls. The evenly lit main hall gives the viewer an idea of what it might have been like to visit the altar in its original natural setting, protected from the elements but enjoying the feeling of the outdoors with open views and abundant natural light. The simple white space and travertine floors take nothing from the white marble altar: the interior space does not compete for attention with the art work, it showcases it. The exterior of the Ara Pacis Museum is also quintessential Meier, but unlike the interior, the exterior does compete with its neighbours and the city for attention. In Rome, the foreground, middle ground and distant view define the full context. The multi-layered city gives at once an even field of view and multiple points of interest. Meier’s museum, however, becomes the only point of interest; you can see the low white cubic form from across the Tiber River; from adjacent streets the museum jumps to the foreground and the building’s extending walls hide neighbouring seventeenth century churches. Meier does make some contextual moves with uneven success. A small plaza is created to the south of the museum with help from a grade change across the site. The plaza, like most in Rome, contains a small well-used fountain for Italy’s hot summers. Meier also uses travertine, historically a basic building block of Rome, throughout the museum. The stone finish is smooth in the interior on the floors and walls, and left rough on the exterior. However, the detailing and use of travertine resembles that used for the Getty Centre in Los Angeles where it is devoid of cultural reference. The Getty Centre was designed before the Ara Pacis Museum, which shows travertine as part of Meier’s repeating building palette, not an attempt at critical regionalism. Although critical regionalism does allow architects to reshape materials and building techniques to create an architecture with a embedded sense of place, here Meier seems to simply enjoy the coincidence. Museums, by design, remove the art object from its context. This is done for reasons of preservation and to bring a new clarity to the object which can now be examined without distraction, the viewer bringing their own reading to the art, unobstructed by external messages. The Ara Pacis Museum’s interior isolates the altar and gives its viewers a modern position from which to view the past. From inside the museum you see the city of Rome from a modern reading room, however Meier removes his architecture from the context of the city. The exterior seems to contrast its neighbours for the sake of contrast and does not bring a further understanding of the city of Rome. ~
1 Ara Pacis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ara_Pacis (August 2008). 2 Reuters, ‘Rome’s new mayor set to tear down museum’, http://www. canada.com/topics/travel/story.html?id=1695ae35-8f3a-41bb-9290- 64808c33b727 (May 2008).
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