Following Christopher Hitchens death, Stephen Fry talks about why he now thinks that the time is now right for the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum to return to Athens.

From:
StephenFry.com

A Modest Proposal
By Stephen Fry
December 19th, 2011

Greece is the Word

I have a modest proposal that might simultaneously celebrate the life of Christopher Hitchens, strengthen Britain’s low stock in Europe and allow us to help a dear friend in terrible trouble.

Perhaps the most beautiful and famous monument in the world is the Doric masterpiece atop the citadel, or Acropolis, of Athens. It is called the Parthenon, the Virgin Temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom who gave the Greek capital its name.
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The New Acropolis Museum has been shortlisted for the European Union’s prize for architecture.

From:
Greek Reporter

Acropolis Museum on Short List for European Award
Posted on 23 March 2011 by Marianna Kourti

The finalists have been shortlisted from 343 works in thirty-three European countries. The award ceremony will take place on June 20th at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, Spain.
The six finalists are Neues Museum (Berlin, Germany) – David Chipperfield Architects / David Chipperfield; Bronks Youth Theatre (Brussels, Belgium) – MDMA – Martine De Maeseneer Architecten / Martine De Maeseneer, Dirk Van den Brande; MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Arts (Rome, Italy) – Zaha Hadid Architects / Zaha Hadid, Patrick Schumacher, Gianluca Racana; Concert House Danish Radio (Copenhagen, Denmark) – Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Jean Nouvel; Acropolis Museum (Athens, Greece) – Bernard Tschumi Architects / Bernard Tschumi; Rehabilitation Centre Groot Klimmendaal (Arnhem, The Netherlands) -Architectenbureau Koen van Velsen / Koen van Velsen.

The prize highlights excellence in contemporary buildings and contribution to the development of new ideas and technologies in urban evolution .
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A new book, from a series on the architecture of museums, looks at the design of the New Acropolis Museum which opened last year in Athens.

New Acropolis Musem (Museum Building)
Author: Bernard Tschumi Architects
Publisher: Poligrafa
ISBN: 8434312344

There are many different reasons put forward for the restitution of the Elgin Marbles to Athens, most of which are strong enough to stand up as sufficient justification on their own, even if the other arguments were removed. In this case, it is the argument for presenting the sculptures in the context of the Parthenon itself that holds the most weight with Nick Thornsby.

From:
Nick Thornsby’s blog

Thoughts on the Parthenon Marbles
Posted on September 17, 2010

I’m in London today, because this morning I took part in a ‘bloggers’ interview’ with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. I’ll be blogging about that soon.

However no visit to London is complete without a visit to one of my favourite places – the British Museum. I particularly wanted to go today because a couple of months ago I was in Athens and visited the New Acropolis Museum, where most of the Parthenon marbles are displayed – many of the remaining marbles, of course, are displayed here in the British Museum.
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Niki Dollis who has worked with the Organisation for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum for the entire duration of the project (& will be known to anyone who visited the site before the building opened), has written a book for children about the actual process of construction of the new museum & the reasons that a new museum was needed.

The book came out earlier this year – it has currently sold out, but I’ve been told that more copies are printed & it will soon be available again in the shop at the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Greek Reporter

Greek Australian Writes Storybook: “Building the New Acropolis Museum”
Posted on 18 September 2010 by Apostolos Papapostolou

The book “Building the New Acropolis Museum” is by Niki Dollis and illustrated and designed by Elena Zournatzi. The children’s book tells the story of the realization of a dream. As Niki Dollis mentions in her introduction, it is “a book about hope, expectation… but also hard work for the construction and preparation of the New Acropolis Museum”. The storybook is published by Livanis Publishing Organization. Dollis is the Director of Mr. Pantermalis’ office, who is the head of the New Acropolis Museum.

Through the 60 pages of her book Dollis familiarizes young and all readers, with the notion of a museum. It is a very interesting subject to begin with especially when it serves as an open window to the world of ancient Greece, such as the New Acropolis Museum.
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As a building that has achieved an iconic level of fame, Greece’s Parthenon has been copied (both well & badly) in many different countries around the world. Most famous is the copy in Nashville, but there are others, such as the unfinished replica in Edinburgh & one in Germany known as the Valhalla, built by King Ludwig I.

From:
Irish Times

Friday, August 20, 2010
Heaven can wait but Valhalla here to stay

FINDING GERMANY: King Ludwig I’s temple thrusts one into the cold heart of Germany’s 19th-century hero cult, writes DEREK SCALLY

THE TEMPLE perched on the hill over the river Danube is a dead ringer for the Parthenon in Greece – only gleaming white and fully intact.
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Victoria University School of Architecture in Wellington, New Zealand, has produced ten scale models of various aspects of the Parthenon. These are now being shipped to Athens for display in the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Stuff (New Zealand)

Parthenon heads from Wellington to Athens
By MIKE WATSON – The Dominion Post

One of the world’s most recognisable buildings has been cut down to size by a Wellington architectural lecturer in models to be exhibited in Athens.

Ten models depicting sculptures and detailed sections of the Parthenon and Acropolis have been made by Victoria University School of Architecture and Design lecturer Jeni Mihova, and graduates Jordan Wisniewski and Matt Fraser.
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This review seems to like some bits of the New Acropolis Museum, but not others. I guess I shouldn’t have expected unequivocal praise from a site called Grumpy Traveller. In some ways, its liking of the interior far more than the exterior echoes the comments Mary Beard made last year.

From:
Grumpy Traveller

Athens, Greece: Review of the new Acropolis Museum
David Whitley has mixed feeling on Bernard Tschumi’s new showcase for the treasures of the Parthenon.

New Acropolis Museum in Athens

If ever something was on a hiding to nothing, it’s the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. It cost EUR130 to build, is designed to hold many of Greece’s most important national treasures and is already being promoted as a tourism flagship.

Naturally, the critics had a field day before it was even opened. Some pointed to the cost, some to the position at the foot of the Acropolis rather than on it, others to the fact that a Swiss architect – Bernard Tschumi – was employed rather than a Greek.
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Although it is now more than six months since the official opening of the building, positive reviews of the New Acropolis Museum keep on coming. This review is from an architectural specification magazine, hence the focus on the materials that the building is constructed from.

From:
Specifier (Australia)

Issue 189
The New Acropolis Museum by Bernard Tschumi
Writer: Robbie Moore

In mid-2007, the Old Acropolis Museum shut its doors. Its collection of giants and centaurs, metopes, pediments and parts of the Parthenon Frieze, were wrapped in plastic shrouds and packed in reinforced wooden boxes, and hauled into the air over Athens. The artworks, some weighing two and a half tonnes, were passed between Europe’s three largest lifting cranes on their way to their new, €130 million home. Now, two years later, the New Acropolis Museum – one of the most significant and frankly political cultural projects of the last decade – has finally opened its doors.

The New Acropolis Museum is as much about the artifacts it’s missing as about the artifacts it holds. Its top-floor gallery, rotated 23 degrees to align with the Parthenon, makes a plain and eloquent case for the return of the Elgin Marbles. The gallery contains a small number of real pieces from the Parthenon, alongside replicas of artifacts taken two hundred years ago by Lord Elgin and now residing in the British Museum. The replicas were not given a fake weathered patina, but were left a perfect, toothpaste white. The contrast with the ancient stones is striking, and deliberate. This is a memorial as much as a museum, mourning a loss.

The architect of the New Acropolis Museum, Bernard Tschumi, is a supporter of the cause. His design destroys an argument used by the British since the 1970s, that Athens was too polluted with smoke and sulphur dioxide to look after the marbles. Athens’ air had already improved with the new metro system and the pedestrianisation of the historic district, but Tschumi further protects the museum’s antiquities with a sophisticated, highly controlled micro-environment. The Caryatids, for instance, were sealed behind glass in the Old Acropolis Museum, but here stand free. The interior conditions are easily preferable to those in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles are surrounded by four walls and lit from above by diffuse daylight and spotlights, while the New Acropolis Museum’s Parthenon Gallery is open on all sides to the unblinking Greek sun. The works can be viewed, therefore, in the conditions they were intended. “Now that the building is finished and everybody will be able to see the quality of light that you get here”, Tschumi told Wallpaper*, “and the way they will be displayed here compared to the way they are displayed in the British Museum, the return [of the Elgin Marbles] will make sense straight away”.
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Professor Dimitrios Pantermalis is visiting Nicosia next week to give a lecture about the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Cyprus Mail

President of Acropolis Museum in Cyprus
Published on February 17, 2010

PRESIDENT of the New Acropolis Museum, archaeologist Dimitrios Pantermalis, will visit Cyprus next week and will give a lecture in Nicosia.

According to an announcement issued by the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, which is organising the lecture, Pantermanis will speak on the New Acropolis Museum, its Architecture and its Exhibition Programme.

More positive coverage of the New Acropolis Museum which opened last year.

From:
Flavorwire

The Acropolis Goes Modern
1:01 pm Monday Jan 25, 2010 by Kelsey Keith

After inevitable delays — including the discovery of an ancient Athenian city under the building site — The New Acropolis Museum is open for business, packing in visitors to the historic but semi-rundown neighborhood of Makrygianni in Athens. The thoughtful design by former Columbia architecture dean Bernard Tschumi and team positions the 226,000 square foot museum over the footprint of the long-ruined city; the exhibition space — ten times larger than that of the previous edifice — provides what could someday be a permanent home for the hotly contested Elgin Marbles and other looted artifacts. Hellenic architecture porn after the jump.

Bernard Tschumi Architects won the bid in 2001 in a design competition chaired by Santiago Calatrava; their winning plan “created a deliberately non-monumental structure whose simple and precise design invokes the mathematical and conceptual clarity of ancient Greek architecture” while establishing a dialogue between the museum’s exhibition spaces and the existing Acropolis buildings.

The New Acropolis Museum which opened last year forms a gleaming new home to potentially house all the surviving Parthenon Sculptures.

From:
Los Angeles Times

A gleaming new showcase for the Acropolis
Athens finally has a place to display the hotly contested Elgin Marbles, plus statues, friezes and other artifacts from the ancient Greek site.
By Suzanne Muchnic
January 24, 2010

Reporting from Athens – For advocates of the repatriation of marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th century and long housed at the British Museum in London, the new Acropolis Museum is proof — at last — that Greece has a safe place to display the hotly contested artworks.

For Athenians who live and work near the Acropolis, the looming modern structure at the southeastern base of the hill is a mixed blessing. The $200-million, 226,000-square-foot museum has transformed the area of Makrygianni, boosting property values while dwarfing other buildings in the neighborhood.
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