An oracle of modernism in ancient Rome

The opening of the Ara Pacis Museum should have been cause for celebration. The first major civic building completed in the historic center of Rome in more than a half-century, it trumpets this city's willingness to embrace contemporary architecture after decades of smugly turning its back on the present.

That the building is a flop is therefore a major disappointment. Designed by Richard Meier for a site at the edge of a Fascist-era piazza overlooking the Tiber River, the museum boasts a muscular main hall built to house the Ara Pacis, an altar erected as a symbol of Roman peace - that is, military conquest - from around 9 B.C. The building's glistening glass and travertine shell has all of Mr. Meier's usual flourishes, from the expansive use of glass to obsessive grids.

But in its relationship to the glories of the city around it, the building is as clueless as its Fascist predecessors. The piazza, designed in the 1930's, was a blunt propaganda tool intended to invest the Fascist state with the grandeur of imperial Rome; Mr. Meier's building is a contemporary expression of what can happen when an architect fetishizes his own style out of a sense of self-aggrandizement.

Absurdly overscale, it seems indifferent to the naked beauty of the dense and richly textured city around it.

Self-importance

That kind of insensitivity tends to reinforce the clich, that all contemporary architecture is an expression of an architect's self-importance. The building is bound to give ammunition to architectural conservatives who clamor that there is no room for bold new architecture in the eternal city.

But if you're going to fiddle with ancient Rome, there are few better places to start than this site, the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. Designed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, it is a prime example of how the Fascists used architecture to reshape and distort history.

The Ara Pacis was excavated from its original site and carted in pieces a short distance to its present location in the 1930's.

Mussolini reinstalled the altar in a new glass-and-stone building by Morpurgo next to the ancient tomb of the Emperor Augustus (63 B.C. to A.D. 14), implying the dictator's supposed bond with ancient emperor-conquerors. The symbolic link between a modern Fascist state and a heroic classical past was fortified by the flanking buildings, with their abstracted facades and shadowy arcades.

Like other Fascist-era planners working in the city's historic heart, Morpurgo callously razed the decrepit old neighbourhoods that once surrounded the ancient mausoleum, as if to liberate the city's repressed imperial history. But he ignored the essence of the city's beauty, the wondrous way you suddenly press up against the facade of an unfamiliar church, for example, or enter an airy piazza that appears out of nowhere.

Although Mr. Meier speaks eloquently about the architectural past, his buildings can be stubbornly oblivious to physical and cultural context. In Barcelona, Spain, the enormous glass facade of his Museum of Contemporary Art inexplicably exposes the interior to the blazing sun. His Getty Center turns its back on the car culture of Los Angeles in favor of the themed fantasy of an Italian hill town.

The Ara Pacis Museum rises between a roadway that runs along the Tiber and the enormous weed-encrusted drum of the ancient mausoleum of Augustus several yards below. Anchored by the main entrance at one end and an auditorium at the other, the museum's main hall is sheathed in glass on both sides so that motorists can catch glimpses of the Ara Pacis and the mausoleum just beyond it as they speed along the river.

A pleasant marble stairway near the main entrance leads up from the piazza to the river embankment.

Shallow steps

The building's best features reside in the interior, along the carefully calibrated approach to the tomblike altar. Just inside the entry, for example, a long, low window extends along the base of the wall to remind you briefly of the world outside. From here a few shallow steps lead up to the altar, which is bathed in natural light.

Mr. Meier has also responded deftly to the Roman altar, supplying a structure that stands up to the sculpture's weight and stark power. The main hall is supported by four heavy white columns that rise to meet a grid of deep beams.

The contrast between the rough finish of Mr. Meier's travertine and the ornate stonework works just fine. There are other nice details. At the back of the hall a stair drops down behind a towering travertine wall to the theater lobby, which acts as a hinge separating the room housing the celebrated altar from the bustle.

Above the theater an outdoor terrace juts out slightly to afford a view up toward the Piazza del Popolo. Yet in Rome context is inescapable, and Mr. Meier's building seems intent on shunning the city's seductive charms.

Like most new museums, the Ara Pacis is stuffed with unnecessary add-ons: an overly formal lobby, a bookstore and a 150-seat theater that seems a wrongheaded fillip in a museum with a single work of art. The museum's bloated size was not entirely Mr. Meier's fault; the government client had something to do with it. But he compounds the problem by playing to the piazza's monumentality rather than countering it with the quietness that its pomposity demands.

The thick slab of a roof only adds to the composition's oppressive weight.

Still worse is Mr. Meier's treatment of two churches, San Rocco and San Girolamo dei Croati, at one end of the piazza. To root his building in the city's ancient fabric, he created a long travertine wall that extends from the museum's main entrance to the roadway beside the river.

Viewed from the road, the wall chops the churches off at half height, so that you don't feel the full effect of their coming into view as unexpected treasures. And Mr.Meier's project overwhelms the piazza below, pressing in on it disrespectfully so that the church facades almost seem to recoil in embarrassment.

In the end his building may be as telling about the sins of our era as Morpurgo's design was of his. While Mussolini's architects can be faulted for trying to reshape the city's history for their own propaganda aims - and to satisfy the egomanical drive of a despot - the museum reminds us that vanity is not unique to generals or politicians. It may be another half-century before Romans go down this road again.

(New York Times)