Center for Contemporary Art Pecci by Maurice Nio

In the Tuscan city of Prato, the Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, designed by the Rotterdam-based studio Maurice Nio, will open in mid-October. The "welcoming alien," resembling a department store or a football stadium, was funded by the Pecci family, who provided a donation of 14.4 million euros for the reconstruction, which took over seven years, and directly commissioned Maurice Nio for the project. In addition to the construction of a new two-story elliptical section topped with a dynamically wavy tower, the existing museum, which was built in 1988 by the prominent rationalist Italo Gamberini (1907-1990), was also renovated. At that time, the museum was the first in Italy to exclusively exhibit contemporary art. Enrico Pecci (1910-88), who was among the largest textile industrialists in Prato, amassed a collection of over a thousand artworks by both Italian and international artists, such as Anish Kapoor and Sol LeWitt.
Maurice Nio's rounded design doubled the exhibition space (by 3,000 m²) and additionally expanded the museum to include a library, lecture hall, classrooms, bistro, restaurant, and outdoor auditorium. The extension also solved complicated access issues and created a more coherent exhibition route. The museum will open to the public on October 16, 2016.

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