NowAthens

Architecture

Architecture in Athens

Athens holds two architectural periods separated by two thousand years, with almost nothing standing between them. Everything recent here is an attempt to stand beside the first without pretending to match it.

• Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center

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  Completed 2016

  Renzo Piano

  A cultural centre in Kallithea holding the national library and the opera. Renzo Piano raised an artificial hill over the whole site and set both institutions inside it, so the roof is a park climbing to a height level with the Acropolis. A thin ferrocement canopy on slender columns floats above the opera and carries the photovoltaics. The building is a piece of ground before it is a pair of institutions.

• Acropolis Museum

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  Completed 2009

  Bernard Tschumi

  A museum at the foot of the Acropolis, built over an excavated neighbourhood. Bernard Tschumi lifted it on columns placed between the ruins and glazed the ground floor, so the excavation stays visible underfoot. The top gallery is rotated to align exactly with the Parthenon and sized to its dimensions, holding the frieze in the order it was carved. The gaps left in that frieze are the museum's argument about the pieces held in London.

• Erechtheion

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  Completed 406 BC

  Classical Athens

  A temple on the north side of the Acropolis, built on ground too uneven to level. The plan steps across three heights and carries porches of different orders on different sides, which no other classical temple does. Six carved figures stand in place of columns on the south porch, holding the entablature on their heads. The irregularity is the design answering a site full of older sacred spots that could not be moved.

• Temple of Hephaestus

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  Completed 415 BC

  Classical Athens

  A Doric temple on the hill above the agora, dedicated to Hephaestus and Athena. It survived nearly intact because it served as a church from the seventh century and was never left to ruin. The proportions are more conservative than the Parthenon's and the optical corrections are slighter. Much of what is known about Doric construction is known because this one was never abandoned.

• Parthenon

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  Completed 432 BC

  Iktinos · Kallikrates

  The temple of Athena on the Acropolis, built in fifteen years after the Persian sack. Iktinos and Kallikrates curved almost every line that ought to be straight: the platform rises toward the centre, the columns lean inward and swell at the middle. Those corrections were made so the building reads as regular from the ground, since a true rectangle appears to sag. It has been a temple, a church, a mosque and a powder magazine, and it was wrecked as the last of those.