Finally after many years of speculation, disputes & delays, an official date has been given for the opening of the New Acropolis Museum. Parts of the building have been open for some time, but no public access has not yet been allowed to any of the museum’s main permanent exhibition spaces. The date set is 20th June 2009.

From:
International Herald Tribune

Greece to open new Acropolis museum in June
The Associated Press
Published: February 13, 2009

ATHENS, Greece: Greek officials say a new museum showcasing masterpieces from the Acropolis will be inaugurated this summer after long delays.

Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said Friday the opening ceremony will be on June 20. Initially, Greece had planned to open the museum ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics.
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More feedback from the talk given at the Royal Institute of British Architects on the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Building Design

Bernard Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum
12 December 2008
By Stephen Phillips

Bernard Tschumi presented his New Acropolis Museum at the RIBA last week, and took Greece’s bid to win back the Elgin Marbles to the next level.

In the early eighties, I covered the Elgin Marbles story for Channel 4 News. Actress Melina Mercouri was Greece’s culture minister, and we filmed her touring the British Museum to inspect “her” treasures, under the guidance of its then director, David Wilson. He played a courteous, stiff upper-lipped straight bat, while she deployed all the emotive powers of a tragic actress. It made good television. There was no meeting of minds. Nonetheless, her eighties offensive made an impact, persuading at least one party leader, Neil Kinnock, to declare for their return.
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Coverage of the talk at RIBA on the New Acropolis Museum. Almost everyone who has seen it is impressed by the museum itself – will this be enough to make the British Museum enter into serious negotiations with Greece on the Marbles?

From:
The Guardian

The New Acropolis Museum: A home fit for the Elgin Marbles?
The soon-to-open museum for the Acropolis sculptures looks fantastic. But will it convince the British Museum to send the Parthenon frieze home?

Last night the president, Dimitrios Pandermalis, and the architect, Bernard Tschumi, of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens were in London to present their plans for the building, which opens sometime in early spring. They gave a clear sense of this impressive-looking museum, which is built in the shadow of the Parthenon atop ruins of late-antique buildings (which can be perceived through the glass floors of the museum’s ground floor). The plan echoes that of the Acropolis itself – the visitor will ascend through the building as if climbing the steep slopes of the hill, passing through halls filled with sculpture from the archaic temple to Athene, before reaching the very apex, where the Parthenon sculptures themselves will be displayed in a large glass-walled hall from which visitors will be able to enjoy wonderful views of Pheidias’s great temple.
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The New Acropolis Museum in Athens once opened may provide the strongest argument yet for the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

From:
Financial Times

A manifesto for the Parthenon Marbles
By Peter Aspden
Published: November 29 2008 00:30 | Last updated: November 29 2008 00:30

It stands like a giant modernist spaceship that has belly-flopped by curious accident opposite one of the most important cultural sites on the planet. Polemics and controversy have been hard-wired into its being. It has taken decades in the planning, years in the realisation, and an extra few months beyond its intended inauguration in the fine-tuning. But, finally, the new Acropolis Museum (left), fresh home to the extraordinary artistic legacy of ancient Athens, is ready to open its doors to the public.

Next spring, visitors will set foot inside Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi’s glass-and-concrete edifice, all sharp edges and skewed angles, and address for themselves one of the the most intractable cultural disputes of modern times. When they travel to the museum’s top floor, they will see marble panels from the famous frieze that used to encircle the Parthenon, the symbol of Athenian democracy that stands like a staid, elderly relative, looking wearily across at the upstart building from its incomparable vantage point on top of the Acropolis a few hundred metres away.
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Bernard Tschumi, one of the two designers of the New Acropolis Museum (along with Michael Photiadis) is to give a talk this coming Tuesday at the RIBA in London on the New Acropolis Museum. Tickets must be booked in advance as space is limited. There is also a second talk for students on the morning of the day after.

From:
Hellenic Foundation for Culture

New Acropolis Museum: The London Preview
Events organized by the HFC in UK and
the Royal Institute of British Architects
2 & 3 December 2008, Jarvis Hall – RIBA,
London

The Hellenic Foundation for Culture and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) present the London preview of the New Acropolis Museum, scheduled to open in Spring 2009, on 2 & 3 December 2008, at RIBA’s Jarvis Hall in London. The events are organized under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture with the support of the Organisation for Construction of the New Acropolis Museum.
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The New Acropolis Museum represents Greece’s most ambitious attempt to reclaim the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

From:
CNN

New Acropolis Museum ready for Marbles
By Eleni Gage
29 October 2008

It’s an incongruous sight: a super-modern, glass-walled building set at the foot of the ancient Acropolis.

But while the New Acropolis Museum, designed by New York-based architect Bernard Tschumi, may appear to defy Athens’s great history, it is, in fact, the city’s most ambitious attempt to reclaim its cultural patrimony: built to hold archaeological finds spanning 2,500 years, including the absent Elgin Marbles (portions of the Parthenon frieze), which the Greek government has been trying to recover from the British Museum since the mid 1800s.
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Mary Beard, author of a book on the Parthenon who has regularly voiced her views on the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, is to lecture on Saturday 1st November in Chicago as part of their Humanities Festival.

From:
Chicago Tribune

Originally posted: October 16, 2008
Making no little ideas: Five architecture-related programs you shouldn’t miss at the Chicago Humanities Festival

With the Chicago Humanities Festival fast approaching–it’s titled “Thinking Big” in honor of next year’s 100th anniversary of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago–here are five recommendations for architecture-related programs. The number in parentheses is the program number in the festival.
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Despite earlier predictions that the New Acropolis Museum would open this Autumn, it appears that the opening date has now shifted to early 2009. It is unclear if there is a specific reason for this dealy.

From:
France 24

Fresh delay for Acropolis Museum
Tuesday 16 September 2008

Inauguration of Athens’ “ultra-modern” new Acropolis Museum has once again been delayed, Greek authorities announced. The brand-new facility features an empty room reserved for the Parthenon’s “Elgin marbles”, owned by the British Museum.

The opening of a new, ultra-modern Acropolis museum located below the ancient Athens landmark has been pushed back until February or March next year, Culture Minister Michalis Liapis said Tuesday.
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The Parthenon Gallery is in every sense the high point of a visit to the New Acropolis Museum. Even journalists who have initially been against the whole concept of the museum have come away awed by its creation of a suitable space for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

From:
The Times

August 28, 2008
Athens welcomes the ghost of Phidias to new rooftop gallery
Marcus Binney, Architecture Correspondent

The new rooftop gallery built to display the Parthenon marbles is one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces in modern architecture.

Just as the Parthenon itself enjoys a 360-degree panorama of sparkling sea and green hills, the new ¤130 million gallery has a continuous view over the rooftops of Athens, interrupted only by the Acropolis itself. Sunlight fills the gallery through floor-to-ceiling glass, and the windows have such slender supports you might be standing in the open air enjoying blue skies and the crystal light which is the wonder of Attica.
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In this interview, Bernard Tschumi makes it very clear that he believes that the Elgin Marbles will return to Athens, stating that the return will make sense to everyone once they see the facilities created within the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Wallpaper

Bernard Tschumi Q&A exclusive
Architecture
8 August 2008

After nearly 30 years of planning, and eight years since the international competition was launched for the project, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens is ready: the collections are carefully being moved in as we speak, and the official opening is expected with much anticipation towards the end of the year.

Proudly headed by architect Bernard Tschumi, the new museum project team also comprises local architect Michael Photiadis and the museum’s director Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, who showed us around the new bright and airy building, where we had the chance to meet Swiss-born Tschumi, and discuss his concept, the design, Athens and the Parthenon sculptures.
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An exhibition about the New Acropolis Museum has been running in Beijing since February.

During July though, in the run up to the Olympics, many more exhibits were added & a catalogue was produced to explain about both the museum & some of its contents that were on display.

This catalogue (in English, Greek & Mandarin) can be downloaded from the New Acropolis Museum’s website here.

When the New Acropolis Museum was being designed, the artefacts within it were considered as the factor that would define its eventual form. In this respect, the building is an anti-Bilbao – the form of the building is generated from the function, rater than a form being defined with the function them examined to see how it can fit within.

From:
Spero News

A vision for the new Acropolis Museum
The museum at the Acropolis is no mere shell. According to architect Michael Photiadis it was designed from “the inside out” to highlight the artifacts over architectural considerations.
Friday, August 01, 2008
By Danylo Hawaleshka
Article Tools

It somehow seems fitting that a museum built to showcase the architectural legacy of a temple honouring the warrior goddess Athena should itself be the outcome of numerous battles, some as yet unresolved.

For instance, Greek authorities required not one but four bare-knuckled design competitions – the first held more than 30 years ago – before deciding architects Bernard Tschumi of New York and Athens-based Michael Photiadis would bear the responsibility of creating the New Acropolis Museum.
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