New Acropolis Museum

By Raymund Ryan - 24 October 2009

The New Acropolis Museum is an intelligent building. Rational, unadorned, didactic, experiential, it’s a major achievement by Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-French-American architect and theorist who, since winning the competition for Paris’s Parc de la Villette now a quarter century ago, has surprised - if not silenced - his critics by applying polemical concepts to the assembly of steel, concrete and glass. Tschumi’s work is abstract rather than empirical or representational; his architecture has ambitions far removed from any simple replication of known architectural imagery.
The New Acropolis Museum is also a political trophy for Greece’s ruling class. It’s a bravura, 130 million Euro propaganda machine recently inaugurated, after decades of false starts and bureaucratic setbacks, amid vaguely comic pomp and circumstance. Its mission is not only to house stunning historic artefacts from the ancient Acropolis (a mere stone’s throw away) and now protected for future generations. The New Acropolis Museum is a potentially lethal weapon in Greece’s demand that the British Museum return the so-called Elgin Marbles from London to their origin in Athens.
You easily see the museum from the Acropolis and you easily see the Acropolis from inside the museum. Visitors to the ancient hilltop site still take the meandering path up a steep slope to enjoy the group of buildings that symbolise classic Athenian achievement. The Acropolis has suffered over the millennia: from Christians, who defaced representations of the ancient Gods; from Venetians, who bombarded the arsenal of the Ottoman Turks; from dire atmospheric pollution; and from a single British aristocrat, Lord Elgin, who shipped key components of a linear frieze from the most important building, the Parthenon, back to his foggy homeland in the early nineteenth century.
On the Acropolis, you are drawn inexorably to the Parthenon with its outer ring of Doric columns silhouetted against the sky. You sense the...