The building is located in the historical part of the city, on the site of an old brewery. The architect tried to convey movement in her building, a "transitional state" between horizontal and vertical surfaces, indoor and outdoor / private and public space, old (including both the main museum building and buildings around) and new.
The complex with a total area of 12 thousand m2 includes both exhibition and utility rooms (storerooms, underground parking, etc.). Its main entrance is highlighted by the overhanging glass cube of l'Art Café; the main exhibition hall with white walls, an audience enclosed in a bright red volume inside and out, a video art hall with a black basalt floor (this material is found everywhere in the building: its brutality should remind of the "industrial past" of the site), white walls and black ceilings, and a bookstore.
Many rooms of the museum are illuminated through glazed ceilings; from the outside they look like irregular volumes of dark laminated glass, playing the role of a "landscape" on the roof-terrace of the building.
Following the grand opening of MACRO, held in parallel with Zaha Hadid's MAXXI opening on Rome's “Contemporary Art Weekend,” the building closed until the fall, opening its doors to the public only in October.
