Built after an international design competition, won by starchitect Bernard Tschumi, the new Acropolis Museum replaces the small (1,450 m2) 19thand mid 20th-century museum nestled into the sacred hill's surface. Containing 14,000 m2 of gallery space, it is tightly inserted in neighbor ing Makriyianni. Decades ago, in the area earmarked for the museum, an ancient urban site, ranging from before the fifth century B.C.E. to the Byzantine period in the ninth century C. E., was discovered. A 23,000 m2 museum and plaza have, nonetheless, finally been constructed (for 130 million), raised directly over this important site; supporting columns and seismic isolators avoid archaeological features.2 The Acropolis offers an aerial view of the museum. The building proper is a tripartite structure, characterized by an increased use of glass as it rises. The top floor?a glass enclosed rectangle, with dramatically cantilevered corners, rotated off-axis from the museum's lower levels?is designed to house the Parthenon sculptures and intriguingly echoes the temple's own orientation. During the day, however, the glass looks dark and opaque, and the museum's contents cannot be discerned. An inscrutable angular form planted amid Athens' urban sprawl of small, pale buildings relieved by green hillocks, the huge new museum is unrewardingly disjunctive. Arriving museum visitors descend flights of steps and cross an uninviting gray marble plaza with glass windows (slip pery despite nonskid black dots) that afford glimpses of the archaeological site (fig. 2). The excavation is exposed beneath the outsized entrance canopy, whose upper surface is a terrace for the museum's restaurant with an Acropolis view. Inside the unprepossessing, low-ceilinged, black-marble floored lobby, visitors purchase entrance tickets ( 5) from prominently placed cashiers. More black-dotted glass floor panels afford further views of the archaeological site. Glass and black marble floors, given the dirt tracked in, require frequent mopping?a distressing allocation of labor when, lacking funds for guards, parts of Athens' National Archaeo logical Museum are closed.