In Defense of the Ara Pacis
Author’s Note: While I consider myself to be an avowed neoclassicist, Meier’s building needs some defence in a world that has a love-hate relationship with the ‘new.’
Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis museum is lonely. Bound by the peach neoclassical facades of the buildings all around it and haunted by the unfinished piazza that would have extended its external space to the Tiber, the Ara Pacis museum stands out. Meier’s building has been the recipient of popular ire and protest from the start — a former government minister burned a model of the building in protest, and in 2008, Rome’s Mayor, Gianni Alemmano, pushed for the building to be “scrapped.” Nicolai Ouroussoff, writing as The New York Times’ architecture critic in 2006, accused Meier of “self-aggrandisement,” writing that “the museum reminds us that vanity is not unique to generals or politicians.”[1]
The site of the museum, the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, and the museum itself has a past that is marred by fascism. Mussolini, who fashioned himself after the first Roman Emperor Augustus, moved the fragments from Palazzo Peretti, where they were first found in the sixteenth century, and had them moved to the current location, besides the masoleum of Augustus. Simultaneously, Il Duce had an entire block of buildings razed, sparing only two baroque churches, which now overlook the southern end of Meier’s piazza. In 1938, the architect Vittorio Morpurgo designed a shell for the Ara Pacis, with steps on either side, mirroring the design of the Ara Pacis.
Meier was commissioned by the Mayor Francesco Rutelli in 1995 to design and build a museum to hold the Ara Pacis along with the piazza around it. This was severely needed, as Ouroussoff’s colleague, Alan Riding notes, “Few people ever visited the Ara Pacis: in its previous crumbling home, it had become a forgotten treasure.”[2] Meier’s museum would be “the first major civic building completed in the historic centre of Rome in more than a half-century.”[3]
Meier’s design for the building was far more expansive than what we see today. The expansion of the piazza all the way to the Tiber, instead of being blockaded by the road that divides it from the river, would have created a plane in which Meier’s building could have held its own. Interference from Rome’s famed archaeological superintendent, Adriano La Regina, stalled many of these plans. The travertine-lined piazza would have become a new public space for Rome, providing seamless access to the Tiber while preserving the ethos of the piazza that dominates Rome’s cityscape.
Rome’s status as the Eternal City and over 2,000 years of building and inhabitation leave few spaces remaining for contemporary architects to leave their marks within the confines of the Aurelian walls. This exacerbates many of the critiques levelled against the Ara Pacis memorial, for it is one of the few buildings in the historic city that have been built in this contemporary style. Much of the criticism levelled against Meier’s building, which replaced Morpurgo’s design, save for a wall commemorating the achievements of Emperor Augustus, is populist in tone and could be ascribed to any building that uses styles championed architects such as Meier and Le Corbusier. Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian politician, likened it to a Texan gas station, a critique that makes little to no sense when one actually looks at a Texan gas station. In 2008, Rome’s Mayor, Gianni Alemmano, pushed for the building to be “scrapped,” only acquiescing after finding matters that needed attention.
The oft-bemoaned travertine wall that drops from the level of the road alongside the Tiber to the level of the piazza is Meier’s tour de force, which he reclaimed for people from a car park.[4] On the bustling street, one of Rome’s major roads, it is hard to hold a conversation without speaking loudly. The travertine wall acts as a sound barrier, and the gentle gushing of the water alongside the walls to the fountain kills any residual sound, making the piazza a place where people meet, interact, read, and write, activities that happen long after the museum closes its doors. While his design for the fountain may attract its fair share of criticism, there is no doubt that Meier has made a space that people use and remember beyond the museum and enjoy for its relative silence and convenient location.
Rutelli chose Meier partly because of his experience in moulding interior spaces and in exploiting natural lighting.[5] Meier, who spent a year in Rome at the American Academy, knows his way around the city and its architectural history. The Ara Pacis was originally located in the northeast corner of the Campus Martius, an empty ground used for military drills. It was in an open space, lit by natural light and only accessible from the front and back. Meier’s design for the museum lets natural light permeate the monument and hopefully give viewers an indication of how it looked in its original setting. Its high roof does not come into view unless one strains one’s neck upwards and allows the Ara Pacis to dominate its own space. The glass façade allows motorists and pedestrians alike to examine the Ara Pacis without entering and without interruption of any kind in the form of pillars, which dominated Morpurgo’s design. The physical separation inside the museum that demarcates the space of the Ara Pacis from the space of the lobby and displays reinforces the separation of time between the past and the present.
Meier’s minimalist modernism, inspired by the likes of Le Corbusier, avoids clashing with the Fascist-era architecture around it, while simultaneously keeping its distance, intellectually and physically. One of the reasons for rebuilding the Ara Pacis museum was to absolve the monument of its Fascist origins, and Meier’s building is pure both in its whiteness and in its active distinction from the tainted Fascist style that dominates much of the areas that surround it. While the colour white is a staple of his style of architecture, white has also been associated with purity, a feeling that many in Rome were anxious to bring to the Ara Pacis. After all, Il Duce’s Augustinian fantasies resulted in the Ara Pacis being relocated and reassembled.
The building and the surrounding piazza do have its shortcomings. The steps on the piazza clash with the rising grandeur of the facades of the churches in front of them. The fountain, as was told to me, “looks like it came from an American suburban mall.” But Meier’s building does what it is supposed to do — present the Ara Pacis while cleansing it of its Fascist taint — and goes beyond. It incorporates an exhibition space that is currently playing host to the Magnum Portfolio, an exhibition that contains work by some of the most remarkable and renowned photographers in the world. The auditorium, too, is functional and useful. Meier incorporates these into the building with his own flourishes of style. Every architect has their individual style, and they must be allowed to flaunt it — if Michelangelo and Bernini did it, why can’t Meier? This is Meier’s contribution to the Eternal City, and hopefully the times will catch up with it.
[1] Ouroussoff, Nicolai. “An Oracle of Modernism in Ancient Rome.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Sept. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/arts/design/25paci.html.
[2] Riding, Alan. “Richard Meier’s New Home for the Ara Pacis, a Roman Treasure, Opens.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Apr. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/arts/design/24paci.html.
[3] Ouroussoff, Nicolai. “An Oracle of Modernism in Ancient Rome.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Sept. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/arts/design/25paci.html.
[4] Squires, Nick. “Giant Mausoleum in Rome That Held the Remains of the Emperor Augustus to Be Restored after Decades of Neglect.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 16 Jan. 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/16/giant-mausoleum-rome-held-remains-emperor-augustus-restored/. See photo in article for a view of Morpurgo’s design and the usage of the piazza as a car park.
[5] Seabrook, John. “Roman Renovation.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 2 May 2005, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/05/02/roman-renovation.
