Negotiating absence: Bernard Tschumi's new Acropolis Museum in Athens

Abstract

The ambition to inaugurate the new Acropolis Museum illuminated by the Olympic flame of 2004 and broadcast worldwide was not fulfilled. Difficulties and delays of practical, economic and archaeological nature were in the end less daunting than the political, legal and ideological obstacles to the aspiration of crowning the new museum with the Elgin Marbles, which were moved to London about two hundred years ago. The expatriation of the Parthenon fragments and the repeated requests for repatriation, both brought to play in Bernard Tschumi's highly persuasive structure, define a striking prism through which to look at some of the urgent and conflicting issues haunting the museum institution today (Fig. 1). Driven by the ideals of enlightenment, the idea of the public, universal museum, perfect and complete, proliferated at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1796, only three years after the foundation of the Muséum Français (the later Musée du Louvre), Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy advised passionately against the relocation of antique monuments to European capitals in his ‘Lettres au géneral Miranda sur le préjudice qu'occasionnens aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monumens de l'art de l'Italie, Le démembrement de ses écoles, et la spoliation de ses collections, galeries, musées, etc.’1 In hindsight, however, the physical removal of ancient art and architecture marks not only the decontextualisation of these objects, but also their re-location from one discourse to another. Once relocated to the museum, architectural elements are invested with new functions and historical and aesthetic values that radically alter their significance. Thus, as Greece today reclaims the Elgin Marbles by means of a compelling architectural rhetoric, the discourse on decontextualisation gets a new twist, now including the possible re-contextualisation of a fragment whose original context has changed beyond recognition. In fact, Quatremère himself anticipated this delicious paradox in his Canova-correspondence of 1818 on the Parthenon Collection in London. Here, Quatremère addressed with surprising precision a fundamental museo-theoretical problem regarding decontextualisation as well as re-contextualisation; a problem to which Tschumi's design for the new Acropolis Museum gives such an eloquent architectural manifestation.