Threshold, Enclosure, Museum.

When a visitor crosses the Propylaea threshold, the monuments in the large enclosure of the Acropolis overwhelm with their majesty; an open-air museum, however, still hard to comprehend. The buildings of the Acropolis are subject to compositional rules not understandable at the present moment, that the project tries to make clearer.

The sacred ritual paths, the “promenade architectural”, are the leitmotif of this project, which tries to emphasize the kinematics of the classical composition, the progressive visual sequences through which it develops. It is therefore essential to suggest the idea of a walk in the archaeological site, through the layers of space and time, the interweaving of eras impossible to perceive on the surface.\r\nIn order to rediscover the complex palimpsest, two museum spaces were designed, which embrace the ruins of the main buildings of the Classical and Mycenaean era: the first one refers to the area overlooking the Propylaea extending to the Erechtheum, around the ruins of the Arrephorion. Archaeology is embraced by ramps that expand to form small pauses, in relation to the museum exposition, which takes advantage of the thickness of the containment poros wall to accommodate the sculptural works; a fence that protects the archaeological evidence. \r\nThe structure of the entire project is designed by elements mounted “in situ”: starting from the poros wall, built with a gravity technique in order to counteract the thrust of the soil, through the beams and steel pillars; elements that are grafted on the rocky ground following the slope, which is reflected in the change in altitude of the underground space, suggesting the difficulty of the acropolis orography. \r\nThe roofs of the second underground space, south of the Parthenon, overlap to evoke the terraces of the classical Parthenon, leaving the temple the opportunity to express its strength and majesty in a context whose reading has been altered for centuries. If on the surface are recovered the paths typical of the classical era, the underground rooms propose new routes innervated in the soil: the interweaving of the ages that have won the passage of time jealously guards the scene in which the visitor moves.\r\nThe Acropolis, which had previously lost most of its internal relationships, becoming intrusive and chaotic, now turns to the visitor with a renewed formal clarity and renews the dialogue with the city, for which it has never ceased to be a point of reference.