Greeks Go for All the Marbles In Effort to Get Back Artifacts

When the current campaign for restitution began in 1982, the Greek argument was based on grievance and nationalism. The Greeks deserved the marbles back because they were fundamental to Greek identity. But, implicitly at least with all their talk of being the source and origin of all things Western, the Greeks were also arguing that Greek culture had universal, international importance, so much so that one might assume that it should be internationally held.

And the modern Greek connection to the classical past was also, some argued, a fairly arbitrary use of history to forge national identity. Too many centuries of change and cultural intermingling and linguistic and religious evolution had severed the connection between scruffy shepherds of the Peloponnesus, when Byron visited, and the penetrating wisdom of Socrates.

Today, Korka says, the argument is about making the Parthenon whole, not about the Greeks. The Parthenon is "a symbol for Western civilization, a point of reference for the whole world," she says. Therefore, it is in the interests of the world to see its marbles reunited. The Greek culture ministry now publishes a little book that shows, for instance, the body of the goddess Iris on one page (from a frieze held in London), her head on another (a chunk of marble currently in Athens), and the two pieces reunited on a third.

"There is a very large part of the museum which has nothing to do with the marbles," insists Tschumi. Which is true. But the tone -- the fundamental atmosphere of the building -- is set by their absence. The museum emphasizes the need to transcend fracturedness through its proximity, its alignment, and its gallery with mourning veils draped over the casts of the hostage marbles in London. It is a severe building, and a very simple one (in its effect, if not in the architectural challenges it posed).

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The Acropolis Museum rises on more than 100 large concrete pillars, set into the earth like archaic columns. The challenge that thwarted earlier attempts at a new museum -- how to build in an ancient neighborhood without destroying ruins -- was finally solved by raising most of the structure off the ground.

As you enter the museum and prepare to ascend a slowly rising hall into the first-floor exhibition space, glass floor panels reveal what Pandermalis says is a tiled floor from a 4th or 5th century B.C. banquet room. Even after a trip through the Athens subway, in which one station has a Roman-era sewer system preserved as if in a museum, this direct view into the most storied age of Athens is strangely titillating.

From the outside, the severity of the building is daunting. It is huge (with 150,000 square feet of exhibition space) and it feels decidedly foreign, and perhaps a bit fortresslike in its surroundings. The lower floors, which will display sculpture from the Archaic and Classical periods, are trapezoidal in shape, and cut like a knife's edge into the fabric of the old neighborhood. And the top gallery, the Parthenon space, feels almost arbitrarily aligned, as if someone had simply given it a little twist in relation to the rest of the structure.

Inside, however, it makes much more sense. The Parthenon Gallery's relation to the Parthenon itself becomes clear. The sheer size and openness of the galleries also give some hope that the maddening thing about touring Greece -- the crowds, the human traffic jams, the throngs of tourists gibbering about beauty just like you-- may be a bit more manageable. Tschumi, in his theoretical writings, has always emphasized the dynamic, the importance of bodies moving through architectural space. It's unlikely any visitor to the new museum will be able to enter into solitary communion with anything in it, but perhaps the openness of the gallery will accommodate the volumes of people better than some of Greece's other archaeological museums.

Tschumi has also managed to design a building that feels both minimalist and classical at the same time. Without echoing the Acropolis or succumbing to ancient kitsch, Tschumi has built something that reveals its design and structure and purpose as clearly as a Doric temple.

Part of its purpose, everyone here acknowledges with varying degrees of diplomatic discretion, is to force the question of the Elgin marbles. The size of the building and the pedigree of its architect emphasizes that Athens wants its new museum to be thought of as a project similar in seriousness and ambition to other "star architect" museum projects around the world. The slickness and design efficiency of the building puts to rest any remaining notion that Athens is unprepared to tend them. The veils over the missing marbles add a poignancy to their absence. It will be curious, should the British Museum ever relent and return the Elgin marbles, to see if the building retains its somber power. For there is something serious, sad and even aggressive about Tschumi's design, rhetorical qualities of a long-standing grievance, that may seem strangely dissonant should Iris ever get her body back.