Showing results 25 - 36 of 69 for the tag: Architecture.
New Acropolis Museum architect Bernard Tschumi talks about the aims of the project and how it was designed to hold the Elgin Marbles.
Listen to the audiovisual presentation at Pidgeon Digital.
Few who have visited the New Acropolis Museum in Athens can deny the powerful argument that it represents for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures. The British Museum’s response however is to continue ignoring the issue & pretending it will go away, claiming that the opening of the new museum does not change anything.
From:
Sydney Morning Herald
A new life for ancient history
August 30, 2009The New Acropolis Museum in Athens brings together Greece’s greatest treasures, writes David Whitley.
If ever something was on a hiding to nothing, it’s the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. It cost €130 million ($222 million) to build, is designed to hold many of Greece’s most important national treasures and is already being promoted as a tourism flagship.
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The New Acropolis Museum is an entirely modern architectural solution, but it respects the ancient buildings that it relates to, while never trying to compete against them.
From:
San Francisco Chronicle
New Acropolis Museum looks forward, honors past
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
Sunday, August 9, 2009Designing a museum figures nowadays as a rite of passage in the careers of many celebrity architects. New York’s Bernard Tschumi faced an unusually stern test in this vein after winning a competition in 2001 to build the New Acropolis Museum.
For starters, he and Athens architect Michael Photiadis had to contend with house ruins – dating from the fourth to seventh centuries A.D. – unearthed on the museum site, about 1,000 feet southeast of the Acropolis and its crowning fifth century B.C. relic, the Parthenon.
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Whilst there have been many articles praising the design of the New Acropolis Museum, it is hardly surprising that some people have other views about the design of the building. The building was however the result of a number of competitions, so although some may dislike the design it is clear that many believed it was the best solution to the complex project brief. In many cases we might want a building to be somehow different, but there are always compromises to be made – trade offs between the building & its surroundings, openness & security etc.
From:
Archinect
Archinect Op-Ed: The Acropolis Museum; An Unhappy Fit
Jul 31, 2009
by Jan LepicovskyLast June, after three decades of competitions and debate, the Acropolis Museum in Athens opened to the public. It was designed by internationally re-known architect Bernard Tschumi, and it houses nearly 4000 ancient Greek artifacts, including the great stones of the parthenonʼs frieze. I first visited the Acropolis 15 years ago as an undergraduate student of architecture. Last month I had the opportunity to visit the site again, now with the eyes of an experienced architect. Hearing about the controversy surrounding the new museum, I was eager to see how one of the great theorists and idols from my student yeas responded to such a challenging, high-profile commission. My first glimpses of the building brought that familiar rush of excitement and anticipation, the kind you get at a concert just before the performer takes the stage. The simple geometric volumes, one rotated above the other, were familiar from pictures and, seeing it live, I could appreciate its powerful yet restrained presence. I walked the long way around to the front in order to take in the whole exterior. By the time I had made it around the block to the entrance, my initial excitement had faded and a different impression began to form.
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Bernard Tschumi, the architect who designed the New Acropolis Museum will be a keynote speaker at the annual Latsis University Prizes Ceremony at the University of Geneva.
He is giving this talk at 18:00 on Monday 5th October.
Rather than trying to compete with or emulate the Parthenon, the New Acropolis Museum instead uses its elegant minimalism to provide the perfect backdrop for the artefacts within.
From:
Toronto Star
Modernity enhances antiquity
Nearby Parthenon inspires reverent tribute to the wonders of Greece’s Golden Age
Jul 11, 2009 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume – Architecture criticATHENS – Architectural egotism notwithstanding, who wouldn’t be intimidated by the thought of designing a companion to the Parthenon?
Not Swiss-born, New York-based architect Bernard Tschumi. His New Acropolis Museum, which opened in Athens just weeks ago, sits at the foot of the celebrated site, just 300 metres from the seminal structure.
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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 FLOWOn 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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This week’s Economist has two articles about the Parthenon Marbles. The previous week they featured an archive article from 1983 on the same subject.
From:
Economist
Leaders
Lord Elgin and the Parthenon marbles
Snatched from northern climes
Jun 25th 2009Greek demands to get back the Elgin marbles risk stopping a better idea: museums lending their treasures
THERE is much to be said for moral clarity. Greece is insisting that the British Museum surrender the marble sculptures that Lord Elgin took down from the Parthenon and carted away in the early 1800s. Anything less, it says, would “condone the snatching of the marbles and the monument’s carving-up 207 years ago.” The Greek demand for ownership will arouse widespread sympathy, even among those who accept the British Museum’s claim to the marbles. With the opening of an impressive new museum in Athens (see article), the sculptures from the Parthenon now have good cause to be reunited, if only for artistic reasons.
But sometimes clarity is self-defeating. A previous Greek administration was willing to finesse the question of ownership and co-operate with the British Museum over a joint display of the marbles. By hardening its position, the Greek government risks driving museums everywhere into clinging to their possessions for fear of losing them. If the aim is for the greatest number of people to see the greatest number of treasures, a better way must be found.
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Further coverage of the grand opening of the New Acropolis Museum. Predictably the British Museum is taking a defensive approach, choosing to try & negate any benefit of the new museum rather than congratulating Greece on this achievement.
From:
ABC News (Australia)
Greece unveils new home for marbles
Posted Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:34pm AEST
Updated Sun Jun 21, 2009 10:23am AESTA new museum has opened in Athens, with a special gallery in it for the Elgin Marbles.
The marbles are Greek sculptures that were part of the Parthenon, but have been held in London’s British Museum for nearly 200 years.
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Greece has built the New Acropolis Museum to re-house artefacts that there was no space for in the old museum on the Acropolis itself. It is no secret though that the key reason for the museum was to help secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.
From:
The Australian
Athens builds a home for Parthenon’s marbles
Helen Vatsikopoulos | June 20, 2009THE New Acropolis Museum in Athens will never become a landmark building. It will not be like Joern Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, its towering tiled sails reaching over the harbour, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with colossal steel whorls dominating the landscape.
But the city of Athens already has such a building, Phidias’s Parthenon. He designed it in the mid-5th century BC, funded by a hefty stimulus package to rebuild the archaic temples destroyed by the Persians; it’s still standing. The temple atop the Acropolis hill overlooking central Athens survived virtually unscathed for almost 2000 years, only to suffer its worst damage in the past 400: Venetian cannon balls, Ottoman dynamite, a bad restoration and acid rain have all taken their toll, along with an act of vandalism perpetrated by one man, a British diplomat. More on Lord Elgin later.
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Many of the press in Greece have been producing special features in supplements in the run up to the opening of the New Acropolis Museum. Athens Plus has produced one in English, that gives an overview of many aspects of the museum from its inception & aims to it current realisation. I encourage people to view the original article in PDF form at the web address given below to see the numerous photos that accompany the text.
From:
Athens Plus
Friday, June 19, 2009
New Acropolis Museum opens its doors
Modern building housing thousands of antiquities is finally ready to welcome visitorsAfter a long wait, the New Acropolis Museum, the most significant landmark to grace the cultural landscape of Athens in years, will open its doors following its inauguration on Saturday.
Priceless artifacts, some of which have been hidden away for years, will be displayed in surroundings especially designed to showcase their splendor. Athens Plus examines the impact of the new museum on the city, the debate about its design, what visitors can expect to see and whether it strengthens Greece’s case for the return of the Parthenon Marbles.
New Acropolis Museum designer Berard Tschumi speaks about his building & why all the surviving Parthenon Sculptures should be reunified within it.
From:
Spiegel
06/16/2009
THE NEW ACROPOLIS MUSEUM
Keeping the Elgin Marbles in London Is Now ‘Untenable’Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, 65, designed a new Acropolis Museum for Athens, which will open this weekend. SPIEGEL spoke with him about the end of Great Britain’s argument that Greece has no proper home for the Elgin Marbles.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Tschumi, you’ve designed the new Acropolis Museum, which opens this weekend in Athens about 300 meters from the Parthenon temple, which in turn sits on the Acropolis itself. Your building alludes to the Parthenon. Did the scale of your assignment ever intimidate you?
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