Greece's Colossal New Guilt Trip

After almost two centuries of frustration, Greece had a new plan: to use the
2004 Summer Olympics, during which the eyes of the world will be on Athens,
to pressure England into returning the missing sculptures that once adorned
the Parthenon.

Known as the Elgin Marbles by those who say they belong to Britain (which
acquired them from the Ottoman Turks, in 1806), and as the Parthenon Marbles
by those who say they were stolen, they have become the world's most
famously contested works of art. But so far, all the diplomacy has not
succeeded in getting them back to Athens, even for a short-term loan. Among
the many reasons British officials give for not relinquishing the marbles:
Greece doesn't even have a suitable museum to contain them.
So the Greek government sponsored an international competition from which
Bernard Tschumi, the celebrated New York architect, was chosen to build a
new museum at the foot of the Acropolis. With the start of the Olympics,
every television set in the world would broadcast its image, and announce
the triumphant return of Greece's lost icons. And if they weren't returned,
the building would stand as a gleaming reproach to Britain's intransigence.
But the structure intended to settle a controversy has become an object of
controversy itself. The design clashes with the setting, some critics say.
It jeopardizes an archaeological site, others claim. And perhaps most
dispiritingly, the Olympic deadline is hopelessly out of reach. Like an
athlete who trains for a lifetime and then sprains her ankle the week before
the games, the New Acropolis Museum may have missed its best chance to make
an impression. When the Olympic torch is lighted on Aug. 13, the museum will
look like something that Athens already has plenty of: a giant excavation.
The marbles, carved more than 2,500 years ago, depict a procession of
hundreds of ancient Athenians to the Acropolis. Lord Elgin (pronounced with
a hard "g"), who served as Great Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Turks,
claimed that by carting the marbles back to England in the early 19th
century, he was "saving them from destruction" at the hands of "malevolent
Turks who mutilated them for a senseless pleasure."
But many art historians have decried the British Museum's stewardship of the
sculptures, which it displays out of sequence. Legal scholars have also
joined in the dispute, contesting the legitimacy of Lord Elgin's claim.
David Rudenstine, the dean of Cardozo Law School in New York, said the
British parliament "committed fraud" when it claimed title to the marbles.
And diplomats have argued that the statues are so important to the culture
that created them - "the essence of Greece," in the words of Melina
Mercouri, that nation's former minister of culture - that they constitute a
special case, distinct from any other debates about art and ownership.
Because of the poor air quality in Athens, the marbles cannot be reinstalled
on the Parthenon itself. The new museum is meant to be the next best thing.
Mr. Tschumi, in partnership with the Athens architect Michael Photiadis, won
the design competition with a smoothly modern, light-suffused entry. Mr.
Tschumi beat out Daniel Libeskind, whose plan was composed of triangular
forms, and Japan's Arata Isozaki, who proposed an egg-shaped building. "It
came at one moment," Mr. Tschumi said of his scheme, "and nothing ever
changed."
The museum will have room for hundreds of antiquities, but its true reason
for being is the glass-walled gallery on the upper floor, where the marbles
would reside. Twisted 23 degrees from the floors below, it will match the
precise orientation of the Parthenon some 300 yards away. Arranged in an
outward-facing rectangle, 21 by 58 meters, the sculptures would stand as
they did 2,500 years ago, and their original home - which Mr. Tschumi says
"has had a greater influence on Western civilization than any other
building" - would be visible behind them.
To some Athenians, the site deserved a truly classical building. Mr. Tschumi
says an engineer working on the building's seismic protections wanted the
museum to be symmetrical, like the Parthenon itself. "But how can you
compete with a building that has reached a state of perfection?" Mr. Tschumi
asked.
"We had a fight," the soft-spoken architect recalled, and eventually he had
the engineer fired. "It became too unpleasant."
With floors made of the same marble as the Parthenon, and slender concrete
columns recalling that building's massive Doric supports, Mr. Tschumi's
design echoes Greece's heritage without stooping to imitation. Mr. Tschumi
says of the museum's style: "The argument of the building is that you can
address the past while being totally contemporary, totally unsentimental.
The way to address a complex problem is with total clarity. There was a
mathematical precision in the work of the ancient Greeks. I'm trying for an
equivalent precision in this building."
A more significant challenge came from a faction of Greek archaeologists,
who viewed the building not as cementing Greece's heritage - but as
cementing over it. The museum's site contains ruins of a seventh-century
A.D. village that, according to Ismini Trianti, the Acropolis's chief
archaeologist, "could shed light on the dark ages of Athens's late
antiquity."
Mr. Tschumi's design calls for a ground floor raised on stilts above the
excavation, allowing work on the dig to continue. Much of the first level
will be made of glass; museum visitors will be able to survey the excavation
beneath them.
The idea of building while leaving the dig mostly undisturbed "should excite
the archaeologists," he said. "There will be no remnants in the world
displayed more beautifully." Mr. Tschumi said the group fighting the museum
is "out of the mainstream of Greek archaeologists."
Nonetheless, last year, a group of scholars working with the Greek chapter
of the International Council for the Conservation and Restoration of
Monuments and Sites convinced the Council of State, Greece's top
administrative court, to stop work on the most sensitive part of the site,
nicknamed the "red zone."
The building's prospective neighbors had their own concerns. The site is in
the Makryianni district, full of drab 70's apartment buildings whose
inhabitants didn't like the idea of a 200,000-square-foot building going up
in their midst. They complained on the conservation and restoration
council's Web site that "for the price of a ticket visitors will be able to
peer into" their homes.
Mr. Tschumi, the debonair former dean of Columbia University's architecture
school, is no stranger to politically charged architecture. His first built
project was the Parc de la Villette in Paris, one of the "grand projets" of
Franηois Mitterrand. It took 15 years to complete, and required him to lobby
five successive prime ministers. "What I learned is, you have to give time
to time," he says. The maxim " sounds better in French," the Swiss-born Mr.
Tschumi added. He vows to fly to Athens every six weeks for as many years as
it takes to get the museum built.
Last March, Mr. Tschumi spent three days in Athens with concerned
archaeologists, walking the building's intended site and, as he said,
"negotiating the location of every column." Large concrete pipes were
installed where the columns will be erected, and the site was filled with
sand. When the museum is complete, the sand will be removed and, according
to Mr. Tschumi, the dig will be just as the archaeologists left it.
As for those who don't like the design of the building, he says, "when I
built Lerner Hall" - a student center at Columbia University, surrounded by
beaux-arts structures - "I got the same letters and e-mails, many with
sketches showing me how it should look." After Lerner Hall, he built a
7,000-seat concert hall in Rouen, France, and an architecture school in
Miami, a series of boxes made (in deference to the school's tight budget)
from unadorned concrete panels intended for parking garages. In 2002, Mr.
Tschumi won a startling five major architectural competitions.
Meanwhile, with the Olympics approaching, the Greek government has grown
increasingly heavy-handed in its efforts to move the project forward. Last
December, it passed a law that doubled as the museum's building permit - an
unprecedented move to override local authorities and pesky judges. (The
Council of State is preparing to rule on the remaining legal claims.) Then
last July, police units were ordered into the Makryianni district to empty
flats that were condemned to make room for the new building. According to
news reports, residents were barely given time to collect their personal
belongings. One protest leader, Eleni Gika, was reportedly carried off in a
head lock after refusing to leave her apartment.
Mr. Tschumi says the residents were "paid handsomely to move," and adds:
"It's history. The Acropolis itself was built on the site of a smaller
temple." Mr. Tschumi added: "Cities are built in layers. Otherwise, we'd be
living in an Indian village in New York."
Still, Mr. Tschumi doesn't think of himself as siding with the establishment
against protesters. The architect - who describes himself as "sympathetic to
the left" - still has a scar from his arrest during the Paris protests of
1968.
But even from the left, there's more than one way to view the marbles
conflict. In October, Mr. Tschumi met Neil MacGregor, the director of the
British Museum, at a symposium in Brighton, England. Over dinner, "he
implied that to keep the marbles in London was the leftist position," Mr.
Tschumi recalls with amazement. "He reminded me that Karl Marx wrote `Das
Kapital' in the British Museum." Mr. MacGregor could not be reached for
comment. But Hannah Boulton, a spokesperson for the British Museum, said
that with more than 5 million visitors a year, and no admission charge, it
is "a museum for the masses."
Despite an offer to send loads of other antiquities to Britain in exchange
for the marbles, and, reportedly, to make the New Acropolis Museum a branch
of the British Museum, its official policy is unyielding. Mr. MacGregor's
latest public statement, posted on the Internet this month, insists, "Only
here can the worldwide significance of the Parthenon sculptures be fully
grasped." Ms. Boulton confirmed that the building of the Athens museum will
not change the director's position.
But for the New Acropolis Museum to change anyone's position, it has to be
built. Dimitris Pandermalis, a prominent archaeologist and president of the
Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, predicts that
construction will gear up next month. Currently, a single crane is working
on the uncontested portion of the site.
Evangelos Venizelos, Greece's minister of culture, says that if the new
museum is finished but the marbles are not returned, that gallery will sit
empty, "as a constant reminder of this unfulfilled debt to world heritage."
Hugh Pearman, the architecture critic of London's Sunday Times, reports that
unofficially "there is a shift of mood. The old worries about correct
museological conditions in Greece may start to fade."
As for Mr. Tschumi, he is optimistic that the building will serve its
purpose."I truly believe that the day the museum is finished, the marbles
will return," he said.
Fred A. Bernstein contributes to a number of architecture magazines. Anthee
Carassava, in Athens, contributed reporting for this article.
January 18, 2004
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Source: New York Times