Zaha Hadid’s new MAXXI centre for contemporary art in Rome has been 10 years in the making.

When I went to see it recently, I was impressed. It’s not just by the building, which is old-school Zaha, still with echoes of her early built projects. It’s also the neighbourhood. This is in the Flaminio district of Rome, just north of the tourist centre, where few previously ventured unless they were either soldiers – there are army barracks there, and MAXXI occupies the site of one of them – or architecture buffs looking for the remnants of the 1960 Olympics.

The usual targets are the Palazetto dello Sport by Pier Luigi Nervi and the athlete’s village, now slightly shabby if lushly landscaped lower middle-class housing. But the buses and trams go there, and the manhole covers have the proper Roman-legion SPQR symbol.  With a new bridge across the Tiber planned for the end of Zaha’s street, It’s all ready to become an integrated part of the capital.  But as well as the new Zaha building and the Olympic there is, a few hundred yards away, the enormous, slightly sterile Renzo Piano designed concert hall complex (Parco della Musica), completed in 2002.  The huge carapaces of the three halls, like giant cockroaches or horseshoe crabs, make a big impression from a distance, but work less well close up when they start to appear crude.  In contrast, Zaha’s Maxxi is ultra-bespoke, hand-crafted, its sinuous tendrils of concrete beautifully finished and the quality of its interweaving interiors mesmerising.

We’ll be shouting a lot more about this seductively twisting building in our January issue. In the meantime, enjoy these interim photos.