Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England. 30 November 2006 ARA PACIS MUSEUM, ROME Rome’s autumn sunshine seems to have softened Peter Davey’s critical faculties when reporting on Richard Meier's new cover building for the Ara Pacis [AR October 2006, pp 54-61]. In urban design terms, it is difficult to read Mussolini’s huge square on which the museum now sits except off plan (p56) because of the massive towering presence of the giant Tomb of Augustus at its centre. So the new museum ought to relate more carefully to nearer structures such as the principal facades of the two churches of San Rocco and San Girolamo dei Croati, at one end of the piazza. Alas, Meier’s 'mini-Getty' design of long roughened travertine walls, steps and cascading water features chops the churches off at the knees visually when viewed from the riverside. And what could have provided an intimate courtyard space for the church entrances is now nothing more than a mean alleyway. Inside the museum the delicately conserved, cleaned and reconstructed altar (reformed through anastylosis with great intellectual prowess and craftsmanship) is extremely difficult to appreciate to its full advantage because of the full height glazing – witness the overpowering sunlight and shade in Edmund Sumner's excellent photographs. This is why most museums and galleries have only natural top lighting, no? I suppose the architect's brief included instructions to give the appearance of the altar being outdoors again as it was originally? If so – why the heavy white roof? The processional routes through the building are oddly narrow. The shop is a cramped postage stamp, the basement a wasteland awaiting a first class interpretative exhibition and the architectural detailing shoddy. While Meier's Los Angeles Getty Center stonework is appropriately crisp with exposed open joints and concealed clamps and supports, the Ara Pacis museum's stone cladding internally is a half-hearted botch with polymeric spacer blobs in each course detracting from the masonry.   I was not impressed. Yours etc John Fidler RIBA     Getty Guest Scholar 2006 and Former Conservation Director, English Heritage