May 27, 2009
New Acropolis Museum architect says Elgin Marbles should be returned
As Bernard Tschumi looks back on the New Acropolis Museum project that he began when he won the competition in 2001, he discuses why he thinks that his building is the best possible home for the Parthenon Marbles.
From:
Bloomberg News
Return Elgin Marbles, Says Acropolis Museum Creator: Interview
Interview by Maria PetrakisMay 27 (Bloomberg) — Bernard Tschumi can afford a smile as he looks around at his new creation, the New Acropolis Museum, after an eight-year campaign to get it designed and built.
The Swiss-born architect has been on a Greek odyssey to get the $177 million structure ready, visiting Athens frequently to balance demands of conservationists, planners and archaeologists.
The museum officially opens on June 20 and is Greece’s answer to the British argument that there’s nowhere in its capital to house the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures taken from the Parthenon’s frieze to the British Museum. Tschumi argues that the stones should be the centerpiece of his gleaming concrete and glass building, which was constructed to house them and to boost the Greek case for their return. Replicas of the London stones will sit next to those left in Greece.“You can have a Van Gogh at the Metropolitan and another at the Louvre,” Tschumi says. But, the Parthenon Marbles are “one story. It’s got to be together at the same place and there’s no better place than here.”
Successive U.K. governments have repeatedly declared that the marbles will not be returned. The British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor, in a 2007 interview, said objects in the collection could in theory be loaned for three or six months, though this would be impossible while the Greek government refused to acknowledge that his trustees are the legal owners of the stones.
Gods, Giants
The fifth-century B.C. frieze depicts gods, giants, Greeks and centaurs in the annual Panathenaic procession. The new museum’s rectangular shape marks the continuity and narrative with the Parthenon temple on the top of a hill 300 meters above it.
Tschumi, 65, says that some archaeologists didn’t want him to build above an ancient city. He had to negotiate over where to put the concrete pillars that support the three-story museum. At the entrance, some of the pillars are just four inches (10 centimeters) away from millennia-old walls. All had to be built to be able to withstand earthquakes.
“I was caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Tschumi, who has longish graying hair. “I had my structural engineers who wanted to put a lot of walls and beams and, on the other hand, the archaeologists who said ‘touch nothing.’ I spent days walking and saying can we put it here; let’s move it a little bit to the left.”
Three Decades
The museum will open more than three decades after the 1976 first call for a design, and 10 years since the discovery of an ancient city forced the Greeks to seek a new one, incorporating the excavations. The final concrete and marble geometric design, by Tschumi in collaboration with Greek architect Michael Photiadis, was chosen after a competition in September 2001.
The glass gallery is the main event, swiveled at an angle to the rest of the building. With the temple above, excavations and archaeologists underfoot, and constrained by a small plot surrounded by apartment buildings, Tschumi says the design is inspired more by Pythagoras, the 6th-century B.C. mathematician, than by Phidias, the master-sculptor of the time who oversaw the construction of the temple.
“There’s no way at the beginning of the 21st century you can try to imitate even superficially the art of 2,500 years ago,” he says. The “precision of the concept was really what counted and we were not going to do little design games.”
On the Move
Tschumi is constantly on the move: talking to a glazier who says he has invented a new kind of glass for one of the displays, greeting workmen and discussing angles of a promotional shot with a photographer.
He designed Paris’s Parc de la Villette and is a former dean of Columbia University’s school of architecture. Tschumi has spent longer on this construction site than on any other project, working on everything from decor to structure.
“A lot of time” was used by testing glazing for the middle section, the archaic gallery. It was important to blur the view of “people putting out their washing, broken refrigerators left on the balcony,” he says.
Now, as visitors wind their way amid the freestanding statues of gods, fragments and busts, there’s only outlines of the modern city and the apartment terraces just meters away. Tschumi calls them “the ghosts of Athens.”
Artisans and builders are swarming over the structure and paving the streets outside. A dilapidated building still sits on one corner of the plot, testimony to the court challenges from residents and homeowners that helped delay construction. Tschumi says the museum will be ready.
“I’m not worried about it,” he shrugs. “The Greek way.”
He won’t be drawn into the latest debate over the museum, whether two historic buildings facing the Acropolis should be torn down to provide an uninterrupted view and archaeologists’ access to more ruins.
“Polemic is a Greek word,” he says.
For more information on the museum, go to http://www.newacropolismuseum.gr/eng/.
To contact the writer on the story: Maria Petrakis in Athens at mpetrakis@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: May 26, 2009 19:00 EDT
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