The New Acropolis Museum is an intelligent building. Rational,
unadorned, didactic, experiential, it’s a major achievement by
Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-French-American architect and
theorist who, since winning the competition for Paris’s Parc de
la Villette now a quarter century ago, has surprised - if not
silenced - his critics by applying polemical concepts to the
assembly of steel, concrete and glass. Tschumi’s work is
abstract rather than empirical or representational; his
architecture has ambitions far removed from any simple
replication of known architectural imagery. The New Acropolis
Museum is also a political trophy for Greece’s ruling class.
It’s a bravura, 130 million Euro propaganda machine recently
inaugurated, after decades of false starts and bureaucratic
setbacks, amid vaguely comic pomp and circumstance. Its mission
is not only to house stunning historic artefacts from the
ancient Acropolis (a mere stone’s throw away) and now protected
for future generations. The New Acropolis Museum is a po