Rome’s Nuvola (Cloud) is at last taking shape. After years of delay, the capital’s visionary new conference centre has finally obtained the go-ahead. Anyone passing the former site of the Agip petrol station and parking space just beyond the Marconi obelisk on Via Cristoforo Colombo, EUR’s main thoroughfare, can see the excavators hard at work digging out the foundations for this unique, futuristic creation, designed by one of the world’s leading architects, Massimiliano Fuksas.

Although Fuksas’ project was officially approved in 1998, a prolonged legal wrangle with the contractor who originally won the tender blocked the building process for five years. The problem was only solved in 2007. Work is now going ahead with the support of business partner EUR SpA (the company that owns the land where the building is to stand) and its offshoot, the Rome Business District (RBD), proprietor of Rome’s new trade fair and exhibition space, situated on the road to Fiumicino airport.

“We have to make up seven or eight years of delay,” Fuksas remarks, adding that he is indebted to former Rome mayor Walter Veltroni for his help and support in getting all the necessary permits through in record time. “On 11 December last year, Veltroni laid the symbolic first stone. The last bit of paperwork was completed on 31 January and on 1 February the diggers were already on site,” he recounts with visible satisfaction.

Fuksas, a powerfully-built man in his 60s, was particularly keen to realise this project. He is of Lithuanian origin, but he was born and brought up in Rome and considers it his home. Although he has created revolutionary structures all over the world, including the Twin Towers of Vienna, the Graffiti Museum of Niaux in France, the Peres Peace Centre in Jaffa, Israel, the St Petersburg Gazprom Tower, the African Institute of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, and the Armani Emporiums of Hong Kong and Shanghai in China, as well as different constructions in other parts of Italy, this will be his first work in Rome. And it is a building destined to make history.

The “Cloud” has been conceived as a diaphanous structure of undefined shape, an ectoplasm of silicone and fibreglass that will appear to hover inside a huge glass and steel “display cabinet”. The entire 198 m-long glass conference centre will contain a total of 8,500 seats, distributed among two large congress halls, a number of smaller meeting rooms and the “floating” Nuvola auditorium (securely anchored on a concealed cement and steel base) with seating for 1,842 people. A 6,000 sqm exhibition space, known as the “Forum”, will occupy much of the ground floor and communicate with a new 439-room hotel to be built alongside the centre, as well as two underground parking lots for a total of 2,215 cars. The entire roof area of the conference centre will be covered with solar panels to generate much of the energy needed for the building.

Fuksas claims that the inspiration for this astonishing design came to him quite by chance. “I was working in France when the competition for the design of the new conference centre was launched worldwide. I was 54 and pretty well established and, at first, I didn’t intend to compete. However, I had this dream of achieving something really big in my own country. I took it as a personal challenge.”

He was in Greece, he recalls, when the idea came to him. “I was at the seaside, looking up at a clear blue sky, when I began to envisage a cloud being blown by a strong wind. I remembered a dream I had had, that involved constructing a building that had no crystallized form at all. I thought I could achieve this illusion if I managed to put together a variable geometry — a box of glass with an object inside, a membrane that would seem to expand and that would shine luminous at night.”

Although Fuksas claims he participated in the competition almost by chance, there was nothing casual about his preparations. He pulls out a hefty album of meticulous plans and drawings and flicks through the pages. In all, he completed over 6,500 drafts for the Nuvola design.

“I believe that an architect ought to do this. It’s part of the job. A lot of architects these days have stopped drawing up proper construction plans. I also believe that it’s my business to go on site and check personally on work progress. It’s up to each one of us to take individual responsibility for our actions and situation.”

Obviously, a project as ambitious as Rome’s “Cloud” won’t come cheap. Estimated building costs are set at e277 million. Financing is guaranteed — partly with government funding for Roma Capitale (a special fund for Italy’s capital city) and partly by EUR SpA and with future revenue from the conference centre itself.

Completion is scheduled for the second half of 2010. “It has to be finished,” is the dry comment of Mauro Miccio, president of the RBD. “Because we’re already selling conference space for 2011.”

Fuksas is in full agreement. The new Milan Fair at Rho (also designed by him) was completed in 26 months, he points out, respecting both deadline and budget. He is determined to demonstrate that this can also be done in Rome.

After all the initial setbacks and delays, this “Cloud” at last appears to have a silver lining.

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