ATHENS – It’s been acclaimed as one of the best museums in the world – mostly for what’s inside and what’s not – the missing Marbles – but the exterior of the Acropolis Museum is a far from classical as you can get, a bold modern concrete departure from what visitors can see from its expanded windows rising above, designed to give a bird’s-eye view of the stunning Parthenon.
Ironically, more people now – more than 1.5 million a year – come to the museum than the 2500-year-old classical structure atop the Acropolis that remains one of the world’s greatest treasures and iconic sites.
The $130 million, four-story opened on June 20, 2009 to great fanfare, and more than a little debate over its design and location and several competitions, with Swiss-French national Bernard Tschumi, who lives in New York, finally being chosen, in a collaboration with Greece’s Michael Photiadis, a project aimed at also hoping to get back the Parthenon Marbles stolen by Lord Elgin 200 years ago and now housed in the British Museum, which refuses to return them. There’s space waiting for them on the top floor, with a view to where they used to sit.
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