At the cutting edge in Rome, the architect spurned by Britain

Construction begins this week on an ambitious new national gallery of modern art that could turn Rome, loved for its ancient ruins and classical heritage, into a shrine for contemporary art and architecture.

The Iraqi-born and British-based architect Zaha Hadid has designed the National Museum of Contemporary Art on the northern fringes of Rome in a project that the city fathers believe will outshine Frank Gehry's spectacular Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Hadid, the prima donna assoluta of world architecture, predicts that her new complex will help to modernise Rome, a city she says is "frozen in time, steeped in ancient culture but largely devoid of modern culture".

But Hadid's ravishingly contorted design for the €130m (£84m) space will provoke even designer-friendly Italy into love-it and hate-it camps.

And there is a chance that the centre will cross a dangerous line by being more interesting than the art and architectural exhibits it contains. It's a syndrome that Hadid herself suffers from: her buildings and ideas are sometimes seen as part of her assiduously cultivated diva-like manner and the entourage that supports it.

Her Rome commission is the latest in a long line of projects whose cutting edge appears to be surplus to requirements in Britain. Hadid has yet to land a major commission in the UK despite a burgeoning portfolio of often brilliant work for clients in Singapore, Japan, Austria and America.

The architect, trained and based in London, has managed nothing more here than the Millennium Dome mind zone and two projects that did not come off: an opera house for Cardiff and an extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Civic fear and loathing killed the Welsh project, while she came second to the V&A spiral proposal by the Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind.

Hadid's Rome project, large in scale and complex in its sweeping physical articulation, will be the masterpiece against which her future work will be judged. And a handful of other British architects will be nodding their heads sagely. Will Alsop, for one: his greatest building to date, the so-called Grand Bleu government offices in Marseilles, would never have been accepted by British planners; neither, nearly 30 years ago, would Paris's Pompidou Centre, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.

This kind of architecture is risky. Hadid, like the best of the new wave, is redrawing, if not erasing, the rules of the past.

She, like the equally cultish Rem Koolhaas, is not only conjuring up new architectural forms, but developing new and rather mindbending ways of describing them.

Rome's Centre for Contemporary Art is, she says, "a world to dive into", a place of "directional drifts" and an "inferred mass subverted by vectors of circulation". It's architecture, all right, but not as Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier knew it. And that's hardly surprising: most of Hadid's designs arise out of compulsively jagged scribbles that are then worked into more refined shapes.

But what has Rome let itself in for? Art as part of a three-dimensional critique, that's what. Hadid says white gallery neutrality is absurd in a world of increasing transience and virtuality. "Absolutism has been indefinitely suspended." The centre will, therefore, be "a porous organism". Translation: floors will warp into walls, and walls into ceilings; solid will morph into transparent.

Hadid's place as one of millennial architecture's top-guns is already secure not because of her over-the-top manner and considerable collection of designer shoes and outfits, but because she is an original who knows that it's getting harder, rather than easier, to create buildings that mean something in the increasingly complex maelstrom of modern experience. The new centre, located in the suburb of Flaminio, is scheduled to open at the end of 2004. The 1,300 square metre site will house spaces for permanent, temporary, and commercial galleries, an architecture centre and also a library. And it will be a sensation that will make London's Tate Modern look like the power station it once was.

It is the latest in a series of projects that is fast turning Flaminio into a district dominated by contemporary architecture.

A short distance away is the site of a sparkling new auditorium, a silver and red music venue described variously as a beetle and a basketball stadium, designed by Renzo Piano. Nearby, too, Massimiliano Fuksas is to build the headquarters of the Italian space agency. Established on the horizon, just across the river, are the white meringue peaks of Rome's Olympic stadium.