The dynamic between action and stillness in a new earring inspired by the MAXXI. “It was interesting to design the MAXXI in layers, like a large and compact piece of history condensed into a moment.” Zaha Hadid is both succinct and visionary in describing how she designed the National Museum of 21st Century Arts. With just a few words, she evokes an image that seems almost tangible; we perceive its contours, understanding that they cannot be rigid or defined as one might expect for a building of this type. Its softness, gentle lines, and smooth concrete contribute to the sense of organized chaos dear to deconstructivism and, more simply, to the fluidity that represents the relationship between man and environment.
Rome plays with the contemporary and nurtures the freshness of a spirit that, after three millennia, still yearns to be surprised. We believe that the MAXXI embodies this spirit—a reflection of a city that watches us as we write our stories in its streets and allows us the freedom to manipulate the existing, enabling us to live in front of the past without being mere spectators. Its complex volumes vary and intersect, diving into each other.
The natural light, filtered through the roofing system that protects the galleries, becomes sometimes generous, sometimes contrasting, entering in waves through the suddenly opening windows. Everything is in flux, even its square, which since 2000 has been bustling with vitality—a point of aggregation and exchange in dialogue with the dormant surrounding ex-barracks, patiently waiting for the moment to bloom again, a dynamic between action and waiting. With the earrings inspired by the MAXXI, we have translated this sense of movement and stillness and reflected on how architecture can also be flowing matter. Thus, from a barely hinted curve, with one side resting on the lobe to dress it, they glide confidently along the profile of the face, caressing it.
The novelty for Co.Ro., the fringes, was an intuition that almost surprised us when we looked at the structure from above and in plan, and our eyes began to run and dance over its branches. Just as the MAXXI transcended the concept of a container-museum, carving out its own identity, true in its diversity, the earrings tracing its profile project us into a first that is unexpectedly a bit more glamorous. We like to think of them as a concession to creative freedom, a hyperbole to wear with ironic lightness. When? Out of context, to not take oneself too seriously and to open small Pindaric windows onto everyday life.
