Striving for Silence

1st Prize

VI Edition Paola Mattioli Award

March 2024

Acropolis of Athens, Greece

TEAM:

Davide Betti

Riccardo Giuseppe Meneghello

Andrea Paoletti

Simone Pasini

Matteo Perazzi

The very sense of the Acropolis has changed in the last 50 years and more. While retaining its spiritual nature, it is no longer a citadel closed in on itself but even more a part of the city, a public and urban place.

The contrast between these two conditions is evident, and the Acropolis restoration site adds a further level of complexity. It is therefore both practical and functional motivations and semantics that guide the project and establish its starting point.

The outcome is new spaces of being, areas of work and movement of materials that can serve the construction site activity, but capable of transforming and adapting to terraces on the remains and the surrounding Athenian landscape, museumizable, rearrangeable environments, capable of dealing with the unpredictability of the modern era and the changing needs of the Acropolis.

It is not a coincidence but a choice to position the main and most substantial interventions, including the creation of new spaces construction site, in correspondence with the areas currently occupied by this function. If it is true that one of their reasons is obviously the practicality and convenience of processing and storing building materials in proximity to the monument to which they belong, it is also true that these two areas offer the project an incredible opportunity, that is, the Persian Colmata and the Tyrannical Colmata.

The historic archaeological excavation that took place in these two areas and the related restoration of the earth digs, grants us the possibility of excavating and creating architecture at least partly underground. This option is unique on the Acropolis and is limited to just these two areas for two reasons: the emergence of rock throughout the rest of the plateau is the sacred value of the latter that makes it mostly untouchable. The depths reachable from the excavation are particularly consistent in the South, where only the presence of some older retaining walls of the Periclean rise, in addition to the Mycenaean walls, tey define a possible excavation limit at about 6-7 meters deep, 12 meters adjacent to the base of the crepidoma of the Parthenon, whose massive structure isodome can be brought to light on this side.

The cumbersome presence of the Old Acropolis Museum to the southeast, as well as that of the construction site to the south, are completely reconfigured. The routes that organize the new layout of routes and public spaces are defined by the archaeological remains of the Temple of Pandion, previously hidden by the museum and finally brought to light by the project that surrounds it and makes it visible from above, as well as visitable. The remains of the Temple of Rome and Augustus, together with the reconstructions of the enclosure around the Parthenon, define the turning point of the Panathenaic processional route towards a surface route or the descent into the underground plaza that leads to the new construction site/museum, the threshold of which is emphasized by a cantilevered volume over the entrance.

This area of intervention offers an opportunity to reveal, to the restoration worker or the visitor to the museum phase of this architecture's life, hidden Acropolis presences, such as the thickness and solidity of the Pericles Wall, which defines the southern and irregular limit of the excavation, and the crepidoma of the Parthenon, which closes the space on the opposite side. The roof protecting these spaces touches the wall and distances from the crepidoma to make it visible also on the surface and ensure, in the early phase of the building's life, the movement of materials from the external works site to the temple inside the cella.

Beneath the platform, only two elements support the roof, and with an extremely concise compositional gesture they suggest different spatialities, without true separations or breaks, without permanently defining a specific functional purpose for the building, but instead anticipating its continual reconfiguration. A wall and a colonnade, resting on a platform, that is, the three elements of Greek architecture, represent the two main structural systems: the point-supported and the load-bearing wall systems. Except that the long wall separating the work area from the service area is not a true wall, but rather a kind of monumental shelving structure for the preservation and display of stone blocks not yet used. A grid of artificial stone, perfectly proportioned to reflect the rhythm of the Doric columns of the temple it faces, whose intercolumniation is further subdivided to position the vertical supports. A device that, by giving a place and a frame to humble stones marked by time, ennobles them as true monuments in themselves, further enhancing their significance.