tschumi magic

What an amazing building. What an amazing non-building. The New Acropolis Museum in Athens is everything that makes architecture so strong and so weak today. It is a building that is not really a building, for its core, its essence is the Parthenon temple on the mountain top, visible from every floor in the museum. What is more, with the third floor of the museum having exactly the shape of the Parthenon, the Parthenon sort of IS in this museum, some 400 metres away (my guess). Just as this building, the ultimate temple, is so present in architecture worldwide that its actual shape can only come as a disappointment.

What Bernhard Tschumi did here is remarkable. He managed to create a completely modern, functioning building that pays tribut to another building. To a building, that is, which is not just plain "old". The Parthenon is, in a way, before the time, before historical time. Most things we count as historical or cultural in one way or another took their start with the times of the construction of the temple. The Parthenon is beyond history, so any museum using him for historical storytelling has to fail. Tschumi anticipated this, and makes his building a celebration of just this failure, by nodding to the big P on the hill, to this magic, lose, obviously fragile combination of more-than-half-destroyed columns.