Few people have had such a long running involvement with the New Acropolis Museum project as Professor Dimitrios Pantermalis. Visitors to the construction site of the museum will have regularly seen him, sowing people around & explaining about his plans for the display of artefacts within the building. He has acted as a representative of the government during the course of the building of the museum – an agent making key day to day decisions, so that quick answers could be given rather than referring everything to committees before there could be a response. As any architect knows, a great client is a vital ingredient in creating a great building – anyone who has visited the New Acropolis Museum will agree about its greatness.

From:
Athens Plus

Dimitrios Pandermalis looks back on achievement so far and forward to further projects ahead
FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2009 – PROFILE
From classroom to construction hat: New Acropolis Museum a work in progress
BY CHRISTIAN FLOW

On the corner of his desk, new Acropolis Museum board president Dimitrios Pandermalis keeps an apt symbol of his labors – a replica head of an early Classical statue, wearing a white construction hat.

For the soft-spoken archaeologist, it’s easy to see the appeal of the juxtaposition. Now an emeritus professor, Pandermalis spent decades in the classroom at the University of Thessaloniki before coming to public life, first as a member of Parliament in the mid-90s and then as director of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum beginning in 2000. And according to several of his colleagues who spoke to Athens Plus this week, it is precisely his ability to blend the academic and the pragmatic, the theoretical and the project-based, the sculptural eye and the construction-hat mentality that has made him – and the museum whose board he now leads – a success.
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Dimitrios Pantermalis is the president of the Organisation for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum. He talks here about various aspects of the New Acropolis Museum.

Make sure to also watch the videos of his interview available in two parts here & here.

From:
Global Atlanta

New Acropolis Museum to Open in Fall After Monumental Move
Phil Bolton – Publisher
Atlanta – 07.23.08

The new Acropolis museum in Athens, Greece, is scheduled to open in September, marking the end of the monumental tasks of building a 270,000-square-foot structure on an earthquake prone site and then transferring 2,500-year-old antiquities into their new home.

Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the new museum and an archaeologist who has been overseeing the project for years, told GlobalAtlanta in a filmed interview that when the museum is finally opened its anticipated 3 million annual visitors will have “a realistic idea” of what classicism is all about.
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