GREEK TRAGEDY
The Acropolis Museum, completed in 2012 by Bernard Tschumi Architects, is a substantial piece of architecture and a substantial piece of work. Tschumi, whose best-known projects have a cerebral anti-sensual bent, was an unlikely candidate to design a home for the archaeological artifacts, including the Parthenon sculptures, culled from this iconic religious site. But he has crafted a building that suits needs exquisitely.
The museum, with a glass skin, concrete floors and round metal-clad columns, is a quiet elegant shell that gives itself over to the objects inside. Its foundations pierce ancient excavations, which are visible through glass floors at ground level. Its column grid aligns with street level on lower floors, and then shifts on the fourth and highest floor, where the Parthenon marbles are housed, to the grid of that building itself, which is visible beyond. The columns here are spaced exactly as those of the ancient structure. What parts the museum possesses of the original metopes, friezes and pediments are displayed in their original configuration, only lowered so that they can be viewed more easily. Missing panels and figures – lost, destroyed, or looted – are replaced with white plaster casts of the originals, which are conspicuously bright and blemishless, or simply left blank.
It’s thrilling to walk through the fourth floor, measuring one’s steps against the rhythm of the columns, and understanding the stories and visual accents in the sculptures, which are designed to be appraised together, like this, and not as single pieces on pedestals. When one reaches the low triangular pediments at each end of the floor, another story begins. They are illegible, as only about 5% of the original marbles are present, with all the missing spots left empty. The majority of the Parthenon sculptures, about 60%, remain housed at the British Museum. For decades that Museum argued that the pieces, claimed by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century, were being held for safekeeping. Now that argument no longer holds.
The Acropolis Museum makes clear that the marbles belong here. And it makes the argument, a political one, simply and convincingly.
Photograph copyright
Christian Richters, Peter Mauss/Esto
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