An architectural competition is soon to be announced, to redesign the entrance route to the Athenian Acropolis.

Entrance path to the Acropolis

From:
ANSAmed

Greece: architecture contest to redesign Acropolis access
26 January, 14:34

Greek culture ministry is set to announce an international architecture contest inviting contestants to present proposals that will make access to the Acropolis more functional and friendlier for disabled visitors and improve the aesthetics of the surrounding area, Greek Travel Pages (Gtp) website reports. Renowned Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis, responsible for the landscaping work of the pedestrian walkways around the Acropolis in the 1950s, envisioned the entrance to the archaeological site as a sort of pilgrimage where visitors, on their way up to the Parthenon, would gain the overall view of the area from all its angles. In efforts to save time, however, tour guides created several side roads leading to the site, which contributed to overcrowding at its main entrance. According to Kathimerini daily, the competition aims to restore Pikionis’ initial vision and plan with the winning architect successfully redesigning the site’s entrance facilities. (ANSAmed).

The Manolis Korres, the architect in charge of the Acropolis Restoration has become the first Greek to receive the prestigious Feltrinelli award for his contributions to the field of Archaeology & restorations.

Manolis Korres

From:
Greek Reporter

Feltrinelli Int’l Prize Awarded to Greek Professor Manolis Korres
By Sotiria Nikolouli on November 24, 2013

The Feltrinelli International Prize was awarded to Professor of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens Manolis Korres, for his contribution in the field of archeology and restorations.

This international award is the highest distinction awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei of Rome — one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific academies worldwide founded in 1603 — and in the past has included members of prominent figures such as Galileo. The Feltrinelli International Prize is awarded to personalities who have distinguished themselves for their high contribution in art, literature, history, philosophy, medicine and mathematics. It is awarded once every five years and is accompanied by a significant amount of money. A second award is given alongside an international organization for humanitarian action.
Read the rest of this entry »

Because of the current start of ruin of the Parthenon in Athens, many theories about how it would originally have looked are somewhat speculative. The fact that Lord Elgin removed many of the sculptures, in no way helps either.

While looking for something else, I came across information on Emory University’s Parthenon Project. They were aiming to try & see how the frieze on the Parthenon might have originally looked from ground level. This fascinated me, as I spent a lot of time creating 3D models to research this same aspect of the building in 2000.

The viewpoint taken by many, is that due to its location & restricted viewing angle, the frieze would have been barely visible to people viewing the Parthenon on the Acropolis, if they did not already know about it. Even then, their views would be limited, because it would be seen from such a steep angle.

With their Parthenon Project, Emory University’s students aimed to use the replica of the Parthenon in Nashville to test out the various theories about the visibility of the frieze.

Although Nashville’s Parthenon is a close replica of the actual Parthenon, it never had the frieze installed due to a lack of funds. This meant that the first task for the students was to recreate the frieze panels. They did this in a variety of ways, creating them flat & in relief, in colour and in black and white. This use of colour is a very interesting step. We know that the panels were originally painted, but when we visualise them, we still tend to see them as they are today in the Acropolis Museum & British Museum, where the detail on them is formed by the shadows cast & therefore becomes more visible when the light is less diffuse. What had not been tested before was how the painting on the surface of the sculptures would have helped to define them more clearly, making the fine detail far more apparent even in the comparative gloom of the location of the frieze (compared to the metopes which were in bright sunlight).

I would be interested to see this experiment re-attempted in Athens – although I’m not sure where it could be done, as the Parthenon now has no roof. The attic sunlight is breathtaking in its sharpness & I wonder whether the sculptures would still be as clear to see on a summers day there as they were in the Nashville experiment.

Visit the website for the project for far more detail about its aims & the issues they encountered in trying to recreate what was originally there.

From:
Emory University

The Problem: the Visibility of the Parthenon Frieze
By Bonna D. Wescoat

The Parthenon is the most famous ancient Greek building, and its celebrated frieze, dispersed between London, Paris, and Athens, is one of the icons of western art. We view the frieze today at eye level within a museum setting, but originally it was placed at the top of the cella wall behind the surrounding colonnade. The location has baffled scholars, who find a serious disjunction between the high level of articulation and meaning, and the low level of visibility. Scholarly opinion on the visibility of the Parthenon frieze is universally negative. The frieze is described as illegible and fragmented, its position dark and cramped. Photographs tend to confirm the awkwardness of the position. In making this assessment, we are of course seriously hindered by the state of the remains. The reliefs are no longer on the building, and the building no longer has its ceiling and roof.

Scholars and the general public have long admired the precise replica of the Parthenon built in the 1920s in Nashville because it allows us to recapture some of the experience of being in an ancient Greek temple. But there is one very important way in which scholars have not yet mined the value of the Nashville Parthenon: it has the capacity to serve as a crucial tool for understanding the visibility of the Parthenon frieze.
Read the rest of this entry »

Annmarie Fitzmaurice has written an essay on the New Acropolis Museum. She looks at how the building combines the past with the present, including the controversy that surrounded the construction of the building on such a sensitive site.

You can view the whole essay online here.

The New Acropolis Museum represents a high point in Greece’s recent history – finally, after years of arguments, political wranglings & archaeological digs, a new home had been constructed to house the Parthenon Marbles. for once, a building was able to tell a story of a modern country that was still deeply in touch with its rich cultural heritage – it was not using moernity to turn its back on the old, but instead using it as a framework to re-evaluate it & re-discover it.

From:
Modern Diplomacy

The Acropolis Museum: a paradigm of Nations Branding in the Making
Peggy Kapellou, Maria Kyriacopoulou Hellenic Foreign Policy

In the gloomy after crisis general ambience in Greece, how many of us still take the time to review major achievements of the country’s reputation to the International Community? And still, it was only three years ago, on June 20, 2009, the whole world witnessed the opening ceremony of what has been characterized by the New York Times as «one of the highest-profile cultural projects undertaken in Europe in the last decade»: the new Acropolis museum.

The inauguration day and the week of various festivities and parallel events, was the culmination of a long run project, carefully planned and implemented as part of an integrated approach.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Parthenon frieze today, whether you look at it in the New Acropolis Museum or the British Museum, is on full display, easily observed by any visitors who stand in front of it. When it was on the Parthenon though, it was a much harder entity to observe – hidden high up, inside the outer columns & thus blocked by the outer beam containing the metopes.

Because it is hard to get access close to the Parthenon because of the restoration works, it is not so easy to see today, just how obscured the sculptures actually were in ancient times. I first looked at this as part of my university thesis, twelve years ago, when I noticed this issue from looking at sectional drawings through the building & then later on a 3D CAD model that I constructed.

It was not a completely unplanned problem though, as the depth of the relief of the carving of the frieze is carefully graded from top to bottom, to enable them to be ore clearly seen from below.

At the time that I was researching the issue, I came up with possible theories on why they might have created such a large amount of sculpture that was almost hidden in this way – but was unable to prove any of them & reached no firm conclusions on the subject. I’m very interested to see what other ideas come up as a result of this new research project into this aspect of the Parthenon’s sculptures.

You can find out more about Emory University’s Parthenon Project here. As with the Caryatid Hairstyles Project, that I mentioned a few days ago, its great to see that so much research is being made into the art & architecture of ancient Greece – and that even with sites as intensively studied as the Parthenon, it is still possible to rediscover many more new things from its ruins.

From:
The Tenessean

Parthenon puzzle is doozy
Art students try to solve mystery behind frieze
3:06 AM, Nov 11, 2012

It’s one of the mysteries of the ancient world, an architectural enigma that has puzzled art historians for centuries.

And one that a group of students were trying to solve on Saturday in Centennial Park.

The original Parthenon in Athens, Greece, was an architectural triumph devoted to the goddess Athena. And in spite of being held up as a masterpiece of the Classical Era, art historians for centuries have wondered why its designers hoisted an immaculately sculpted frieze to a spot partially obscured by the Parthenon’s iconic columns.
Read the rest of this entry »

After the 2012 Olympics, the housing in the Olympic village, currently used for all of the Athletes attending the event, will be refurbished & altered, to convert it into private housing. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, architect Niall McLaughlin has decided to clad some of these building in panels that replicate the Parthenon Marbles, cast out of concrete. Tom Flynn has already written about it on his blog here.

From:
Notes From The Underground

East is East : The Athletes Village and the Elgin Marbles

Once the dust from the Olympics and Paralympics has settled, the Athletes Village will be transformed into East Village. Hosting over17,000 athletes and team officials during the Olympic Games, the Village will be converted into 2,818 residential units including 1,379 affordable homes. The athletes currently sleep in the homes of future owners, fulfilling the site’s own mantra of ‘Beds for athletes, homes for Londoners’. And what homes they are, with beautifully differentiated envelopes and the Lea Valley Park on their doorstep. Meanwhile, with athletes from all 205 competing countries in the village, a worldwide community is sure to identify these individual blocks as home for the next month.

One piece of this differentiation caught my eye in particular. Down at the Building Centre on Store Street, there was a slick exhibition of what the Village will be like after the games. New London Architecture, in association with Delancey, put on the exhibition ‘East Village – a lasting legacy for London’ from the 13th to the 31st March to showcase the architectural and design excellence of the village set within the broader context of the transformation of East London (1). Here models of the entire proposal sat alongside descriptions of the area, drawings from the architects and materials for the buildings themselves. Right in the middle of them all was this:
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 .
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »