Acropolis Museum

Acropolis Museum

Μουσείο Ακρόπολης
Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism
Public transit access	Akropoli
Website	theacropolismuseum.gr

The Acropolis Museum (

The museum was founded in 2003 while the Organization of the Museum was established in 2008. It opened to the public on 20 June 2009.[1] More than 4,250 objects are exhibited over an area of 14,000 square metres.

History

The first museum was on the Acropolis; it was completed in 1874 and underwent a moderate expansion in the 1950s. However, successive excavations on the Acropolis uncovered many new artifacts which significantly exceeded its original capacity.

An additional motivation for the construction of a new museum was that in the past, when Greece made requests for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the United Kingdom, which acquired the items in a controversial manner, it was suggested by some British officials that Greece had no suitable location where they could be displayed.^[3] Creation of a gallery for the display of the Parthenon Marbles has been key to all recent proposals for the design of a new museum.

Competitions for the new museum

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The first architectural competition to design a new museum was held in 1976 and was limited to participants from Greece. Both the 1976 competition and one that followed it in 1979 failed to produce any results mainly because the plots of land selected for the proposed constructions were deemed unsuitable.

In 1989, a third competition for the design of the new Acropolis Museum was announced that would be international. A choice of three possible sites was provided. This competition was won by the Italian architects,

As construction work neared completion, the operation to move the historic artifacts the 280-meter (310 yd) distance from the Acropolis rock to the new museum started in October 2007, took four months, and required the use of three tower cranes to move the sculptures across the distance without mishap. Greek officials expressed their hope that the new museum will help in the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles.^[4][5]

Location

The museum is located by the southeastern slope of the Acropolis hill, on the ancient road that led up to the "sacred rock" in classical times. Set only 280 meters (310 yd), away from the Parthenon, and a 400 meters (440 yd) walking distance from it, the museum is the largest modern building erected so close to the ancient site,^{[citation needed]} although many other buildings from the last 150 years are located closer to the Acropolis. The entrance to the building is on Dionysiou Areopagitou Street and directly adjacent to the Akropoli metro station the red line of the Athens Metro.

The building

The design by Bernard Tschumi was selected as the winning project in the fourth competition. Tschumi's design revolved around three concepts: light, movement, and a tectonic and programmatic element.

The collections of the museum are exhibited on three levels while a fourth middle-level houses the auxiliary spaces such as the museum shop, the café, and the offices. On the first level of the museum, there are the findings of the slopes of the Acropolis. The long and rectangular hall has a sloping floor, resembling the ascension to the rock. Following the hall is a large trapezoidal hall that contains the archaic findings. On the same floor, there are artifacts and sculptures from the other Acropolis buildings such as the

The top level of the Museum sits askew on the lower levels to achieve the same cardinal orientation of the ancient temple on the Acropolis. The spacing of the columns of the Parthenon hall is the same as that of the ancient temple and the use of glass walls on all four exterior walls allows the natural light to illumine the Parthenon marbles as they do on the ancient temple. Unlike the British Museum's Duveen Gallery, where the Parthenon marbles are displayed looking inwards, in the Acropolis Museum, the pediments, metopes and frieze are displayed facing outwards, as they did on Parthenon.[6] The 48 columns in the Parthenon hall mark the outline of the ancient temple and form a colonnade for the display of the Parthenon marbles. For ease of viewing, the pediment marbles are displayed at eye level in front of the end columns; the metopes are displayed on the columns, two per column, but not as high as in the ancient temple; and the frieze are displayed behind the metopes, forming a continuous band around the walls of a rectangular space set inside the columns, as in the ancient temple but not as high, again for ease of viewing. From the north side of the Parthenon hall, one can see the ancient temple above on the Acropolis.

As the museum is built over an extensive archaeological site, some parts of the floor uses glass to allow visitors to see the excavations below. The museum also has an amphitheatre, virtual theatre, and hall for temporary exhibitions.

Controversy

A controversy erupted over the plans of the new museum and whether it was appropriate to build it on the archaeological site in Makrygianni neighborhood. Another concern was whether a large modern building would fit well into the landscape.^[7]

In 2007, another controversy erupted over the proposed demolition of two historic buildings. These are in front of the museum, numbers 17 and 19, Dionysiou Areopagitou Street,

• On 13 May 2010, it was awarded the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) Award of Excellence and Sustainability.[10]
• On 8 November 2010, the Museum won the British Guild of Travel Writers' (BGTW) award in Globe category for the Best Worldwide Tourism Project for 2010.^[11]
• The Museum received 2011 AIA (
  The American Institute of Architects) Institute Honor Award for Architecture.^[12][13]
• It was among the six finalists competing for the 2011 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – the Mies van der Rohe Award.^[14]
• In 2012, the Museum was given the Keck Award for its conservation and restoration of the
  International Institute for Conservation (IIC) in Vienna.^[15]
• Acropolis museum ranked 6th in the
  TripAdvisor's Travellers Choice Awards of the 25 Best Museums in the world for 2018.^[16]

• The entrance fee to the museum was €1 for the first year and €5 thereafter. As of 2019, the entrance fee is €10.
• The excavation below ground level continues. The site and process are visible through the ground level glass flooring. Of June 2019, the site is available for visitation.
• The Acropolis Museum was selected as the motif for a commemorative Euro coin edition: the €10 Greek Acropolis Museum commemorative coin, minted in 2008 to mark the relocation of the museum. On the obverse is a panoramic view of the Acropolis and the new museum lies at the base.
• During the August full moon nights, the museum remains open until midnight and welcomes visitors for free.^[17] Night concerts also take place on the museum's courtyard.^[18]
• In the first two months since the museum opened, it was visited by 523,540 people (an average of 9,200 a day). Of these, 60 percent were foreign visitors. During the same two-month period, 409,000 hits by unique visitors from 180 countries were recorded by the museum's website.
• Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art in Vienna lent (October 2014 – February 2015) to the Acropolis Museum a quadriga with the goddess Nike from the collection of Theophil Hansen, an architect of neoclassical buildings in Greece and central Europe in the 19th century.^[19]
• The University of Sydney's Nicholson Museum lent (December 2014 – December 2015) to the Acropolis Museum a model of the Acropolis done in Lego. The model contains more than 120,000 Lego bricks and took about 300 hours to build by Ryan McNaught.^[20][21]
• The Silver Cup designed by Michel Bréal and awarded to the Marathon Winner Spyros Louis at the first Modern Olympic Games (1896) is displayed at the Acropolis Museum. The Cup remained in the Acropolis Museum until the completion of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center where it is now exhibited.^[22]
• Hermitage Museum lent (March 2016 – October 2016) to the Acropolis Museum three golden Scythian exhibitions. The three objects were two vessels and a piece of jewelry. These masterpieces of metalworking were crafted by the Greeks at Crimea that had developed a close relationship with the Scythians.^[23]
• In June 2016, Samsung inaugurated a digital classroom at the Acropolis Museum. The digital classroom addressed to students of primary and secondary schools. This digital classroom was the first "classroom" which was set up in a Museum in Greece and the fifth in Europe.^[24]
• The
  US President Barack Obama visited the Acropolis museum during his visit at Athens (15–16 November 2016).^[25]
• On 24 March – 31 October 2017, Documenta 14, the fourteenth edition of the art exhibition documenta took place at the Acropolis Museum.^[26]
• On 21 June 2019, Greece's Acropolis Museum opened an excavation site underneath its modern building, allowing visitors for the first time to walk through an ancient Athenian neighbourhood that survived from the Classical era to Byzantine times.^[27]

Gallery

See also

• Elgin Marbles
• Old Acropolis Museum, now closed and scheduled to house workshops for the ongoing Acropolis Restoration Project

References