Acropolis Museum, Athens

Acropolis Museum, Athens | Bernard Tschumi | Pidgeon Digital 14/05/20, 16:27
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Acropolis Museum, Athens

Bernard Tschumi (Bernard Tschumi Architects)
BERNARD TSCHUMI
©Bernard Tschumi Architects
Everybody knows the Parthenon and the Acropolis. There is probably no more
influential building in the whole history of western civilization. The Parthenon itself
was not only the building, but a number of extraordinary sculptures attached, or part
embedded in the stone of the temple itself. Over the years, over the centuries - we
are talking about a building which was completed over twenty five hundred years
ago - these fragments have started to be taken away from the building, either
through accidents of history - earthquakes, wars - or simply looting by, or sometimes
simply in order to protect those marvels, and they went to other museums. We'll
come back to that part of the story in a minute. Namely, as the pieces of the
Parthenon, and the pieces of Greek sculpture were disseminated. Eventually the
Greek cultural establishment felt that it was important to bring things together in
one single Museum, and about thirty years ago, a first competition was held, and
another one and another one, to try to find a way to give the history, or the story, of
that extraordinary period that was 500 BC, 450 BC, where art and architecture
reached an extraordinary level of perfection. Meanwhile, there were other polemics,
which of course had to do with the fact that one of the most extraordinary fragments
of the Parthenon had found its way to the British Museum. Lord Elgin in the
nineteenth century bought from - I won't go into the political detail and how they end
up, ended up in London - but suffice to say that half of that extraordinary frieze that
was around the Parthenon is in Athens, the other half is in London, and imagine to
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have to read a book by having one part of the book in one location and another in
another location; the story is always incomplete. So when, in around 2000, the
decision was made to organise one more competition, it is quite important because it
has a number of issues attached to the fact of building a new museum at the foot of
the Acropolis.
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. AERIAL VIEW

The issues were as follows: the first one - I've mentioned it already - how do you
build a building three hundred yards from the most influential piece of architecture
ever built? The second issue was the fact that the site was so close to the Acropolis
meant that you had extraordinary archaeological ruins on the site itself, and our
competition site had seventy percent of it you were not allowed to build on it or you
had to find a way to protect those extraordinary archaeological finds. That was the
second challenge. And the third one, you can guess, is to do a museum sufficiently
impressive that, eventually, the British Museum would be pleased to return the
marble to Greece so we could locate them in the museum. So that's how it all started
and we were one of the fifteen teams invited to compete. The amount of constraints
was quite extraordinary. In other words, it was not only the excavations in this
location; it was the street pattern around it, the site is very tight, there is a subway
station - we couldn't build there - there are earthquakes - it's Greece, it's a seismic
zone - the heat is a major factor when you build the building. Consciousness about
the environment was also part of the criteria. They were the ones that we had to deal
with, you know, to arrive to a solution. Important for me was to establish a visual
connection between the Parthenon and our building. To establish a visual connection
which would mean that when you would be in the museum you would see the
Parthenon and when you'd be in the Parthenon depending on the light condition you
might even see through what is within the new museum. Not only that, Greece is
known for it's an extraordinary light and those sculptures were designed, were
sculpted, in order to play with the natural light. So we wanted to have as much light
as possible in the museum, so what material do you use; of course you use glass. But
using glass, again in a seismic zone when it's very hot is not the simplest thing. So we
started to look at the museum in relation to the site itself, and we said, and that was
new to me I'm known for having done a number of buildings that were trying to
challenge the site; La Villette with the red follies is a way to play contrasts and
oppositions and tensions and conflicts. You wouldn't play conflicts and contrasts next
to the Acropolis, would you? And so the way we approached...
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. EXTERIOR VIEW

...was to say "Look, we're going to address the sides in terms of exactly what it
provides". On one hand we have the excavations, so the building is going to be on
stilts, anchored, in order not to damage those excavation walls. That's the first layer,
what I would call the base of the building. Then you would have a middle, in other
words all the general collection with all the extraordinary sculptures, and then you
would have a top; a base and middle and a top. And the top would be that glass
rectangle which would have all the finds from the Parthenon temple itself, in such a
way that, as I mentioned, you could see into the glass box and from the glass box, the
glass rectangle, you could see the original temple. So three parts superimposed in
such a way that they would really accept the constraints of the site itself. For
example, I had to negotiate with the archaeologist the location of every column so it
would not damage the precious walls or the mosaics. That gave a certain geometry to
the base. The middle had other constraints, which had to do with zoning, which had
to do with the street pattern of the city of Athens, so this is slightly different from the
base. And then the building, the rectangle, the glass enclosure that relates to the
Parthenon, I wanted it to be oriented exactly like the Parthenon itself. Why? Because
the light that came from the west and from the east to the pediments, the two sides
of the temple, had, I thought, to have exactly the same light conditions as the original
temple. But the original temple is oriented in a direction which is different from the
two other directions, so which means that the building is made of these three parts
that are slightly rotated in relationship to one another, in a way that's unusual; it's
not a straight façade there is those strange kinks. So, of course people said "Oh, of
course he's a deconstructivist, so he deconstructed". Maybe, really, it was being
logical, simply very logical with the constraints of the site. And the...
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. VIEW LOOKING TOWARDS

THE ACROPOLIS
...building, in a sense, is having taken a context, which was very tough, and turning it
into a concept. And while I've always been interested in an architecture of ideas, and
an architecture of concepts, in other words I never work with form - form is only a
point of arrival never a starting point. In this particular case, all the constraints were
my starting point, so conceptualising context was the intent for the project itself.
Then we started to detail it, to take it to the next step. I often say that architecture is
the materialization of a concept. In other words, if you have an architectural idea, at
one moment you have to translate it into materials. That's what makes it different,
that makes architecture different from mathematics or music. Built architecture has
a weight, has a sound, has a smell. In other words, the material you use can either
reinforce the concept, or go against it, and in this particular case I wanted to use as
few materials as possible, in order not to have to compete with the articulation of
small details and try to play form against form - the poor form of the Acropolis
against the form, or the form of the Parthenon, against the form of our building. Our
building had to be as pure as possible. I started to make a comparison with the
sculptor, the great Greek sculptor Pheidias, and I said we cannot compete with
Pheidias, but we can think of another Greek figure who was a mathematician, and his
name was Pythagoras, and I said my dialogue is conceptually just as much with
Pythagoras as it is with Pheidias. So the form comes from geometry and not from
sculpture. The purity of the geometry had to be expressed through materials and we
use three major materials, which were glass...
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. EXHIBITION SPACE

...I mentioned it already, concrete, you need solid foundations, and you need also a
background to the sculptures; so concrete was going to be the structure itself and
the background of the statues, so that we would avoid to have the situation of having
statues in front of drywall, sheetrock, fake whatever background. It was the
structure of the museum itself that would couch us, as many sculptures stand in
front of columns, because columns are supporting the building. That was the second
material; I'll come back to it again. And the third material is of course marble. Marble
is a part of the culture of Greece and all the floors of the galleries are a certain colour
of marble, beige and a whitish light, and then all the general movement through the
building is very dark, almost black, marble. And the idea was that the dialogue
between the three materials would make it so clear again; this organisation in the
base, the middle and the top would be expressed in the materials themselves. We do
that even further on the east and west facade, the way we bring some metal, some
stainless steel, as a way to protect ourselves against the very hot sun in the morning
and the evening. This is the general strategy, but the building is not only what it is
built of, it's also about the movement of the visitors, the movement of bodies within
these spaces. Museums in particular, they have something unusual, is that, and
wonderful, is that you walk in time and in space at the same time. Namely, you go
through a chronology of statues that the creators have located according to their
understanding of the historical period, and at the same time as an architect I want
them to go through a spatial sequence; to go from one group of spaces to another. In
order to do that we felt that, not only it would be a loop that would take you through
the whole architectural promenade, but you would be aware of things that would
happen at two places at the same time. I mentioned the excavations; I wanted it that
when you enter the museum you were aware of the excavation below your feet; so
we made many of the floors out of transparent glass, so that you could look as you
were walking into the museum you would be aware of the layer of history which was
below your feet. So you enter the museum...
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. EXTERIOR VIEW

...as you come in, you see below your feet, you see all these excavations, so it gives
you this sense of history, and you start walking up a ramp which is made of glass; And
you look down. Above your head you have light that comes from the very top of the
building, because we were able to bring light that's such, that important Attican light,
as they called it, from Athens; that Athens light through the whole museum, down to
the excavation. So you walk up this ramp and you arrive into a major space, a very
large space which has about thirty very tall columns, we call it the hypostyle room, in
other words the room of many columns, and it is completely filled with all those
statues, which are like they're populating the room. So you have the visitors and the
sculptures that are mixing with one another, so the sculptures are in dialogue with
the architecture, with the columns, in dialogue with themselves, but when people
walk around they are able to walk around three hundred and sixty degrees around
each of the sculptures. That was, I thought, very important in order to establish that
dialogue between the work of art and the architecture and the visitors. I always say
that architecture is, the definition of architecture is about space, event and
movement. So it meant that the trajectory of the visitors was as much part of the
exhibition as the artefacts. So you go through this room with the many columns and
then you keep going up, you pass by the bookstore and the restaurant, which are
located on the mezzanine, not at the ground floor but later. And then you go further
up, and you arrive at, you know, the climax of the exhibition; there you arrive and you
see something quite extraordinary. You see slightly above the roofs of the city of
Athens - not much, just enough so that at first you come into the part which has light,
you're not anymore in the central atrium and you see the roofs of Athens. You turn
and you follow the frieze, the frieze, that extraordinary frieze which was a design
twenty five hundred years ago; a narrative of the battles that were taking place
between the different groups and the different cultures of the time. That story
which, as you know, is partly in Athens, partly at the British Museum has never, for a
century, over a century and a half, has not been seen all at once. And I think we were
one of the only competitors who restored the continuity of the frieze, so that you
would walk along the story and see simultaneously the narrative as you would see
the space them self; again time and space. I've always been interested in this, one of
my first works is called The Manhattan Transcripts that I did here in New York and
one of the drawings is thirty three feet long...
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. ARCHAEOLOGICAL

VIEWING AREA
...eleven metres long; the only way to look at that drawing is by walking along it. And I
found fascinating to discover, to rediscover that act of seeing the work of art or work
of architecture as a sequence, as a narrative. I've always been interested in the
cinema. The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, an avant-garde filmmaker of Russia in the
20s, had actually been fascinated himself by, not only by the Acropolis where you
would say that was the first moment of architecture in montage, and it had inspired
him to do montage in the cinema, but he had found certain modes of notation that
had inspired me and helped me in the beginning of my own work as an architect. And
I discovered that he also made a movie, a film, called Alexander Nevsky, where he
himself is inspired by the cavalcade and the frieze itself. So suddenly, everything with
that last room came together; the history of the avant-garde in film, the history of
architecture and art in the last twenty five hundred years, or during twenty five
hundred years ago, and also my own work. So it became quite fascinating to develop
this last room, and it's quite magic and so you had this very long, long sequence this
story which is very cinematic, cinematographic; and simultaneously you see the
Parthenon, you see the city of Athens, the art in the city, architecture and of course
the visitors, because I think the visitors are just as much an important moment of
that dialogue; it's not a frozen museum, it's really an event. The museum opens on
the 20th June 2009. In other words, each year after we started to work on it shows
you that architecture is never done overnight, but at the same time, the reason why
it takes so long to do buildings may have to do with - architecture is a life; it creates
polemics. Let me tell you about it: there were some people who didn't want us to
build on that particular site - archaeologists were divided, there were those who
were saying "Isn't it wonderful to build on top, over and above the archaeological
remnants because you're going to be able to establish the dialogue better" was my
position, but there were others who said it should be left alone and nobody should go
near it, right.
ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. AERIAL VIEW

They were of course the people who lived around the area - there are some people
who love the idea of having a new museum coming in the neighbourhood; others
who hated the idea and they were some people who just wanted to get money from
the government because they thought it's a good way to. The polemics, during a
certain period, went so far that the building had a hundred and four court cases
against it. There were people who were suing everybody inside. Nevertheless even
the museum, the jury of the competition got sued for having participated in this. I've
always said that the word paradox is a word from the ancient Greek, and the word
polemic is a word from the ancient Greek, no wonder, and democracy is was invented
there; so hence people love to talk, love to argue and that's been quite, one of the
fascinating aspects of the experience. While at the same time I was dealing with
extraordinary builders, the quality of construction, the man who is behind the
museum Dimitrios Pandermalis, who is an archaeologist in his own right, played a
very, very important role in establishing the coherence of the whole building; as we
often say among architects "You don't have good architecture without a good client".
So here you had, of course, the gods who had produced those extraordinary, or
inspired those extraordinary sculptures and you had people from the late twentieth
and early twenty first century who were quite capable; it was quite an extraordinary
experience. There is one polemic that will go on for a long time - should museums
that were created in the, most of them at the end of the eighteenth century, at the
beginning of, during the nineteenth century, which were trying to bring artefacts
from various locations, from various cultures, in order to present them as a form of
comparison. And the British Museum was one of these museums, of course you have
Le Louvre in Paris, The Metropolitan in New York, and they were extraordinary
places because indeed they were the repository of a thousand years of cultures that
you could see in one single space. But simultaneously, some of these places felt that
they were not complete without the artefact that had been created in their home
ground; in other words and in Greece you imagine the Parthenon being torn apart
and some of its constituting elements, is exactly someone would take your arm and
say "Oh, I like your arm, it's beautiful, I'm going to exhibit it, you know, three
thousand kilometres away". The absurdity or the surrealist dimension of it is that you
have certain cultures with the head in Athens, the torso at Le Louvre, the chest in, at
the British Museum and so how do you piece it together; it's a puzzle. So the polemic
will go on for quite a while. In the case of the frieze I think it's important that it goes
back to Athens, simply because, not only the symbolical dimension of it, because it's
one piece, you cannot take it apart. How does the museum in the experience of
designing and building this museum affect the reading of one's own work? Something
very strange happened. When I started to develop this scheme, during the first two
or three years I would not talk about the museum because I felt it didn't quite fit. The
notion of space, event, movement; some of the discussions which I had developed, a
body of theoretical work, didn't seem to fit with the museum. The museum, the
context around the museum, was so important and so pregnant with all sorts of
consequences that it led to the actual concept of the building. And eventually, I asked
myself, if context is so important in that particular building shouldn't I look at earlier
work and ask myself whether, without having known about it, it had also played a
role. I think that in many ways contrast and dialogue is more important than
imitation. So realising that, I started to look at La Villette and said "Huh, maybe the
red follies were actually quite contextual, in their opposition, to what was around it".
Or that when I did, again with La Villette, the superimposition of the system of
points, lines and surfaces was not that different from the superposition of the base,
middle and top...
BERNARD TSCHUMI
...of the new Acropolis museum, one part addressing the archaeological remnants,
another part addressing the Parthenon. Or another example, we did a project, which
was more of a manifesto, for a very large area in Beijing which was going to be
demolished to be replaced by tower blocks, but that area, which had many
warehouses, obsolete factories, had been taken over by artists, and by galleries, and
they were living there, they were exhibiting; it had become, it's called Factory Seven
Nine Eight, it had become one of the most active cultural centres in China by the end
of the twentieth century, beginning of the twenty first. It was supposed to be all
demolished, and I was called upon to make a proposal of how to save the factories,
and yet maybe to put all those, that million square metres of residential
accommodation. So we said we were going to superimpose them, to have them on
stilts, and to keep all the old factories with the artists and the galleries and have
above, hovering above, what I wanted to keep, all these, you know, housing and
officer and so on, just like the new Acropolis museum. In other words, the idea that
architecture is not only about things next to one another, but in the third dimension,
things on top of one another; that a city is made of multiple layers. In other words,
that meant that you could look at all the work and see it with a different light, thanks
to the new Acropolis museum project, and I found that very exciting.
Related talks:
Bernard Tschumi Richard Meier Cecil Balmond

Space, Event, Movement Jubilee Church Advancing Geometries The Rise O
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Acropolis Museum, Athens | Bernard Tschumi | Pidgeon Digital 14/05/20, 16:27

HOME ABOUT EXPLORE SUBSCRIBE FAQ CONTACT

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. AERIAL VIEW

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. EXTERIOR VIEW

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. VIEW LOOKING TOWARDS

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. EXHIBITION SPACE

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. EXTERIOR VIEW

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. ARCHAEOLOGICAL

ACROPOLIS MUSEUM. AERIAL VIEW

Bernard Tschumi Richard Meier Cecil Balmond

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