Greece's Modern Wonder

That is not the reason I have mixed feelings about the building. It is not the greatest piece of architecture. From the outside it screams airport terminal and implies something sinister going on inside. But it also reveals more going on underneath. An oblong cut in the pedestrian mall leading to the entrance looks down on ancient streets and homes of no particular distinction that were discovered during construction. Tschumi incorporated the excavation into the building and put a glass floor throughout, so visitors could look down on it as they moved.

The surface can be slippery and the view vertiginous, particularly on the ramp that leads rather ceremoniously up to the second floor. In daylight hours, when the interior lights are off, the view below is a little murky. Lit up at night—the museum is open till 10 p.m.—visibility is better and the excavation, which spectators can visit, looks almost romantic.

In a brief conversation during the preview, Tschumi told me his design was deliberately austere, intended to make the building disappear so the collection of objects had the spotlight. But the second-floor gallery for archaic and classical art is so obscured by thick gray concrete columns that it is literally hard to tell the forest from the trees. Worse, every piece of sculpture is so clean and isolated on its own spotlighted pedestal, with no particular relation to anything around it, that the whole place looks like a giant gift shop in some anonymous ether.

Wending my way between fragile figures of mythical creatures, temple steles or Athena Nikes, my attention was constantly drawn outside the windows, toward the Acropolis, which seemed to hover on its hill—the highest point in Athens—like a wounded angel pleading for mercy. Samaras did have a point.

Installed on the museum's third and topmost floor, in a glass and concrete box angled to mirror the Parthenon ruins, the jaundiced original blocks look pretty bad beside the white plaster copies of the originals in London, making the whole frieze appear to be fake. What's wonderful is being able to see the reliefs, which wrap around the wall of an interior core just above eye level, at such close range. They are an indisputable marvel of craftsmanship. Best is to see the frieze at night, when its reflection in the windows makes it appear whole, except of course for the spaces where blocks were destroyed long ago.

It's just as well that no wax casts exist for copies to be made of those sections. It's not Greece that lacks a soul, but the building made to express it. And though the museum exhibits works long hidden from view, the country doesn't need such a behemoth to muscle itself into contemporary culture. During the week of its opening, Athens played host to the second edition of a fledging biennial of cutting-edge art, actually six exhibitions by independent curators from Greece, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. invited to organize them. On a nearly no-string budget, they managed to bring a vibrant international presence to a burgeoning local art scene.

The point is that whether or not the British return the Elgin Marbles, the Greeks already have it all—the glory of the ancient past and the energy of the constant present. It's too bad they don't seem to know it.

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Linda Yablonsky is the U.S. art critic for Bloomberg News and a Scene & Herd columnist for Artforum.com. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Art in America, and Art + Auction. She is the author of The Story of Junk: A Novel.