To: Historians
From: Art Muse
Date: Antiquity To Modernity
Subject: Distinctive Characteristics

A new museum has been constructed for the Acropolis of Athens. Within walking distance from the historic monuments, the Museum is situated at the beginning of the 4 kilometer pedestrian walk of archaeological Athens and just above the Acropolis station of the Athens Metro.
For the first time in modern history all the significant finds from the Acropolis will be consolidated in the one Museum. From prehistory through to the highpoint of the Classical Period and the Parthenon, to artifacts created during the Roman Period and late Antiquity - the Museum will tell the complete story of human life on the Athenian Acropolis.
Dimitrios Pandermalis, President, Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum

Why Build A New Museum
The monuments of the Acropolis have withstood the ravages of past centuries, both of ancient times and those of the middle Ages. Until the 17th century foreign travelers visiting the monuments depicted the classical buildings as being intact. This remained the case until the middle of the same century, when the Propylaia was blown up while being used as a gunpowder store. Thirty years later the Ottoman occupiers dismantled the neighboring Temple of Athena Nike to use its materials to strengthen the fortification of the Acropolis. The most fatal year, however, for the Acropolis, was 1687, when a bomb from the Venetian forces hit the center of the Pallas of Athena that was full of gunpowder. Many of the building’s architectural members were blown into the air and fell in heaps around the Hill of the Acropolis. Foreign visitors to the Acropolis would search through the rubble and take fragments of the fallen sculptures as their souvenirs. It was in the 19th century that Lord Elgin removed intact architectural sculptures from the frieze, the metopes and the pediments of the building.
In 1833 the Turkish garrison withdrew from the Acropolis. Immediately after the founding of the Greek State initiatives to care for the monuments commenced and in the subsequent years discussions about the construction of an Acropolis Museum on the Hill of the Acropolis began. Available sites for the museum were sought but excavations on these brought more antiquities to light. Finally in 1863, it was decided that the Museum be constructed on a site to the south east of the Parthenon and foundations were laid on 30 December 1865. Some of the masterpieces of the Museum such as The Calf Bearer and The Kritios Boy were found in the excavations on the
site on which that Museum was built.
The building program for the Museum had provided that its height not surpass the height of the stylobate of the Parthenon. With only 800 square meters of floor space, the building was rapidly shown to be inadequate to accommodate the findings from the large excavations on the Acropolis that began in 1886. A second museum was announced in 1888, the so-called Little Museum. Final changes occurred in 1946-1947 with the second Museum being demolished and the original being sizably extended.
By the 1970s the Museum could not cope satisfactorily with the large numbers of visitors passing through its doors. The inadequacy of the space frequently caused problems and downgraded the sense that the exhibition of the masterpieces from the Rock sought to achieve. Apart from being unable to adequately accommodate and exhibit the famous findings from the Rock of the Acropolis, the existing Museum is unable to exhibit all the architectural sculptures that have by necessity been removed from their place for conservation and anastylosis works.
For these reasons architectural competitions were conducted in 1976 and 1979, but without success. In 1989, Melina Mercouri, who as Minister for Culture inextricably identified her policies with the claim for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum, initiated an international architectural competition. The results of this competition were annulled following the discovery of a large urban settlement on the Makriyianni site dating from Archaic to Early Christian Athens. This discovery now needed to be integrated into the New Museum that was to be built on this site. Accordingly in the year 2000, the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum announced a new invitation to a new tender, which was realized in accord with the Directives of the European Union. It is this Tender that has come to fruition with the awarding of the design tender to Bernard Tschumi and Michael Photiadis and their associates.

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