MAXXI

Zaha Hadid’s museum of 21st-century art and architecture in Rome is built from bands of concrete and glass that wind, cross and layer over one another. There are no straight walls for hanging pictures in the usual sense; visitors move through spaces that flow into each other.

Hadid won the competition in 1998, and MAXXI, the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, opened in 2010 on a former barracks site in Flaminio. She described the building as a dense network of routes rather than a collection of rooms, and the whole building is movement: the galleries follow the city’s street pattern and stack up on several levels.

Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad in 1950, became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004. She was known for her dynamic, fluid forms, which were long considered impossible to build. MAXXI won the Stirling Prize in 2010 and shows how computer-aided design and new concrete technology made them possible. Her architecture is an example of what has been called parametricism.

• Contemporary architecture
• Zaha Hadid