NowRome

Architecture

Architecture in Rome

Rome is the one city where a building from the second century, one from the seventeenth and one from this one sit inside the same argument about domes and light. Almost everything recent is a museum inserted into that.

• MAXXI

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  Completed 2010

  Zaha Hadid

  A museum of contemporary art and architecture in the Flaminio district. Zaha Hadid ran the galleries as continuous concrete tubes that bend, cross and stack rather than as rooms, so the plan has no single centre. Glass roofs with louvred filters run the length of each tube. The building takes the lines of the streets it replaced and turns them vertical.

• Ara Pacis Museum

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  Completed 2006

  Richard Meier

  A shelter for the Augustan altar on the bank of the Tiber. Richard Meier set the altar in a travertine and glass box aligned to the mausoleum beside it, closed to the west and fully glazed toward the river. It was the first new building in the historic centre since the war and was argued about for a decade. The dispute was the point at which the city had to decide whether it still builds.

• Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza

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  Completed 1660

  Francesco Borromini

  A university church in a courtyard off Corso del Rinascimento. Francesco Borromini set the plan as two overlapping triangles forming a six-pointed star and carried that geometry unbroken into the dome above it. The lantern ends in a spiral ramp that turns as it rises, a form with no precedent in the city. The church is small, and all of its difficulty is in the section.

• Pantheon

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  Completed 126

  Emperor Hadrian

  A temple, later a church, on the Campus Martius. The dome is unreinforced concrete cast with progressively lighter aggregate toward the crown and coffered to shed weight without losing depth, and its diameter equals the height to the floor. The only opening is the oculus, which is open to the weather. It has stayed roofed ever since, which is why later domes were measured against it rather than against each other.

• Colosseum

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  Completed 80

  Emperor Vespasian

  An amphitheatre east of the forum, built on the drained lake of Nero's palace. Its structure is a system of radiating barrel vaults in travertine, tufa and concrete that carries the seating and distributes the crowd through numbered entrances. Three tiers of arcades use the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders stacked in that sequence, a convention this building established. Everything built since with tiered seating uses some version of its section.