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Founding member of Anamorphosis Architects, Nikos Georgiadis, guest edited the March issue 1998 of the Architectural Design magazine, called Tracing Architecture.

by Nikos Georgiadis, AD March 98, p.p 88-96

It seems that the conflict between the historical and the historic - history as symbolic and subject to commemoration and history as real - culminates in the case of New Acropolis Museum competition. Such a conflict which invariably works in favour of the 'historical' is amplified by the idea of universalisation of the exhibits's aesthetic value (as belonging to everybody) and their concomitant detachment from their original spatio-cultural condition.
    The discourse of appreciation and universal symbolisation of the sculptures of the Acropolis, hence the spectacularisation of them as mere 'exhibits', is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of the way ancient civilisations have constructed their aesthetic environment in an all-scale design manner, which conducted all artistic, architectural and urban creation.
    However, the Acropolis 'marbles' recur at the same place, despite the 'anglo-greek debate', and the catholicisation of the treasures (their so-called symbolic universalisation, blandly limited to the territorial confines of the British Museum). Being at the same place is not only a gesture that directs its critique against belonging and ownership but is also a dialecticisation of space breaking beyond a series of a-poli-tical, dasein or anti-dasein theses (from applied negativity, to entropic space).
    The 'classical' recurs here as the necessity of detachment from any idea of symbolic consensus, and also of recognition of the symptomatic reappearance of history as dialectical permanence and future project. Besides, the 'classical' involves directly the real urban structure of the city of Athens to be seen not as a mere site-provider (at the service of the designers' taste) but as building/artifact enabler.
    Our project reads and operationalises the spatiality of Acropolis as repressed but returning condition that exceeds the narrow frame of an isolated 'artwork'. Such a condition is activated as: a) discourse of archaeological findings - mixture of statues, walls, garments, materials, jewelry, city patterns, texts etc. b) discourse of total aesthetics originating in ancient times, encouraging a blend of architectural and sculptural artworks, c) urban experience including processes of gradual localisation and spatial anticipation, extending from the hilltop centre to the city-borders, running parallel to the symbolic development of the city and its rituals.

The New Acropolis Museum is conceived as a popular building destined to be used not 'accidentally' or 'entropically' by wanderers or 'flâneurs' but purposefully by citizens of the world (natives or tourists) introducing polis citizenship as a leading spatial principle. Design aims at a positive building, building not symbolically commemorative of any guilt or loss, but a building-reminder of the 'past' as discourse of presencing and whose persistence now recurs as a historical paradox.
    The project develops as a spatial critique of the idea of an autonomous and monumental museum-building located in the heart of the archaeological area, adjacent to the Acropolis and inevitably competing with it. Thus, the proposed scheme is not a finite building (a place) but a building in process: realised on all three sites (given by the competition brief) as a complex of three distinct urban situations. As a critique of the idea of the embodiment into the greater archaeological area, our museum complex works as a gradual diffusion of the exhibitionist/visual activities away from the archaeological site and the Acropolis itself.
    By using all three sites, the scheme imports the logic of urban experience into that of the building itself and vice versa, and sets the discourse of spatial continuity and accessibility at odds with visual/symbolic integration or fragmentation. So, the building complex progresses in the linear arrangement (Makryianni (I) - Dionysos (II) - Koile (III)) maximising its volumes in reverse to the actual presence of the Acropolis and the existing urban density.
    In site I(close to the Acropolis) the building volume is realised as missing and so availing a large open space to the city; in site II (moderately distanced from the Acropolis) the building is realised in modest volumes, serving mainly auxiliary functions, still availing a large open space to the city; in site III (completely detached from the Acropolis) the main exhibition volume is proposed as a building without reception, amenities or exterior space, but with a rich and elaborate circulation system.

Building in process is neither a split building nor a negated one (applying a split or negated programme) (see respectively B.Tscumi's folies Paris and D. Libeskind's Jewish museum Berlin); it is a multiple building designed to recur and anticipate itself spatially rather than symbolically; it is a search of a building-place always realiseable on the 'next location' as gesture of affluence of space and presencing rather than fragmentation or concealment.
    Each stage works as a specific localisation of the sign of the museum not in fragments but as a quested and missed 'whole' - a spatial articulation of an always missed visual or programmatic completion - as in all three sites the idea of 'one integrated museum' becomes a missing desired singularity.
    So, the museum brief is realised in three distinct building-site relations three localisations of the symbolic/visual epitomisation of the museum as urban significant building, namely: as arrival/entrance, reception and exhibition hall. These align the building to the urban structure, by refering to building-reasons reflecting the logic of urban experience rather than any internal sub-categorisation of the programme.
    The morphological elaboration of the scheme is carried out via morphic anticipations whereby each building anticipates the next one, binding up and embedding the form of the previous ones. Unlike a folie (B.Tscumi) or a dark space (D.Libeskind) the morphology of each 'part' of the building does not reflect a variation or negation of an imposed applied formal order but progresses via the engagement and activation of the available urban morphology.
    At the level of city - building dialectic the space of movement as paradigmatic of the real urban experience, progresses via spatial anticipations and introduces the building always as missed and found signification. Besides, it demonstrates on the local level how the constant ambiguity of the building boundaries coincides with process of limitation and growth of the city as regressive morphological event.
    Site I marks a full presence of the existing 'old' city and 'its Acropolis' as strong visual and symbolic integration; site II is distributional, linking the city with the monument, and interfacing between the existing 'old' fabric and the green; site III (in the green) is a hint of a reclaimed, un-symbolic, spatial 'new' city. Respectively, the building appears as missing approached in the greater dense urban fabric (site I), as accessed and adressed at an itermediate surrounding area (II), as entered and local specific reality (III).

The spatial discourse of the procedural building entails a reconsideration of the symbolic dimension of the city, in a process in which the quested symbolic ideal is gradually transferred from the context of a museum building to that of a desired new city . Here, spatiality and symbolism seem to be reversely analogous to each other. The dimension of space shifts from the symbolically conducted state of a visual and entropic reality (situation I) to the dialectical discourse of the real-specific (situation III); whereas the symbolic condition changes from the state of a mastering ideal imposed on neutral space (sit. I), into a 'missed object' condition, reflecting a totality quested and renegotiable subject to the enginnering of the local (sit. III).
    In the city - building dialectics, a series of tranformations are in progress: from the city as spatially amorphous receptacle of general symbolic strategies (yet bearing in a minimal but rich form (the Acropolis) the real tracing process of its own spatial growth) (situation I); to the city as a possible reworking of spatial distributions (situation II); to the spatial precision of a function specific building (situation III), and furhter up to the dialectics of the border space: the 'local center' at the edge of town where, the spatiality of the city as simultaneously growing and stopping reveals itself as dialecticisation of the local specific.
    The project for the new Acropolis museum has all the characteristics of a route. The route began with the search for a building which appeared gradually; it seemed that the city existed without the building. The quest for the building shaped the route (a spatial experience ). The urgency was the Acropolis itself, as presentation of a drama rather than of an ideal symbolic. The route I-II-III (the very structure of the museum-building) transferred all representation far away, first into the body of the city, then at its borders - there, where the city stops and grows at the same time. The route is irreversible. The 'old' city and its Acropolis gradually disappeared in the light of the 'new' building; yet they remain as a pure tracing process. Now there is a building, but without a city. The desire for the building now gives rise to the desire for a new city.~

Project team (1990): Nikos Georgiadis (principal), Kostis Lambrou, Tota Mamalaki, Anda Damala, Orestis Vingopoulos, Katerina Giouleka;
Presentation team (1997): Anamorphosis Architects - Nikos Georgiadis, Kostas Kakoyiannis, Tota Mamalaki, Vaios Zitonoulis.

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