One for the Ages

ATHENS—The biggest expense and engineering feat in the construction of the Parthenon, the architectural crown jewel of the classical world, was moving nearly 30,000 tons of marble quarried at Mount Pentelicus, 10 miles north, to the Acropolis in Athens. Transporting a single stone using ropes, pulleys, levers, sleds, wagons, and countless oxen (each wagon load required 60 of them) filled two long days. In all, the Parthenon took nine years to build (447 B.C. to 438 B.C.), plus another five years to complete Phidias’s extraordinary interior and exterior decoration.

Five hundred years later, Plutarch judged this timetable reasonable: The buildings on the Acropolis were, to his eye, “created in a short time for all time. Each in its fineness was even then at once age-old; but in the freshness of its vigor it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought.” He also saw the folly in rushing: “Certainly mere dexterity and speed of execution seldom give a lasting value to a work of art,” he wrote. “It is the time laid out in laborious creation which repays us later through the enduring strength it confers.”

If he’s right that a long gestation helps bring lasting value, the New Acropolis Museum, nearing completion in the Makriyianni neighborhood at the foot of the Acropolis, could very well be a building for the ages. For 30 years, a succession of Greek political administrations, archeologists, and historians have discussed the need to replace the existing Acropolis Museum, located a few paces from the Parthenon. With a wealth of objects excavated from the Acropolis in the late 1800s, the old museum ran out of space almost as soon as it was completed, in 1874, forcing significant treasures to languish in storage for more than a century. More recently, officials packed away sculptures removed from the Parthenon and other buildings to prevent deterioration due to exposure to pollution and the elements.

If the creation of the New Acropolis Museum has been circuitous and laborious, Bernard Tschumi, the 63-year-old Swiss-born architect whose scheme was the unanimous choice of a juried international competition in 2001, hardly seems to mind. Though he has been involved with the project for six years, he speaks of it as though he has just taken it on. He’s as sanguine about the 104 lawsuits (“luckily, none directed at me,” he says) that have pestered the process like biting blackflies as he is about having to build on top of the archeological excavation of the ancient Athenian city. That excavation took five years, involved digging as deep as 23 feet, and unearthed more than 50,000 finds, 5,000 of which have been restored.

The mission was straightforward but hardly simple. As set forth by the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, led by noted archeologist Dimitrios Pandermalis, the building needed not only to rise atop the excavations (an area of some 4.4 acres) but also to integrate the finds as an exhibit. Because the collections consist primarily of sculpture and architectural fragments created to be seen outdoors, the organization wanted an interior lit almost exclusively by natural light—in other words, lots of glass—without compromising the comfort of visitors in Athens’s hot, sunny climate. Finally, there was the matter of the Parthenon itself, of creating a dialogue between the new museum and the landmark. Oh, and the building, as well as the mountings for priceless works of art, had to be able to withstand earthquakes.

Not spelled out on the wish list, but looming as large as Phidias’s nearly 42-foot-tall ivory-and-gold statue of Athena once did over the interior of the Parthenon temple, was the desire, if not the mandate, to make a building so compelling and complete in its summation of classical antiquity’s greatest treasures, all drawn from a single rock, that the British Museum would see fit to return the Parthenon marbles. (“Never refer to them as the Elgin marbles,” a Greek friend advised, “especially in Greece.”) With the 2004 Olympics, the Greeks proved to the world, and themselves, that they could deliver a very tall order on time. With the New Acropolis Museum, they hope to achieve a feat as critical to international scholarship as it is to native pride—the unification, after 200 years, of the Parthenon’s magnificent architectural sculptures, most notably its frieze.