On Saturday, huge cranes will begin lifting ancient statues, carvings and architectural fragments off the Acropolis, down to a new museum built at the base of the most famous citadel in the world. For the vast majority of these stone remnants of the great age of Athens, it will be the first time they have ever left this rocky summit.Even as the forces of history washed over this city for millennia, making and unmaking it according to the dictates of three major religions and at least a half-dozen empires, these stone gods and heroes, which once decorated its temples and public spaces, have remained close to their original home. That makes them the lucky ones.

The new museum, designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, has proved controversial from the start. The old Acropolis museum, a low and ugly space built next to the Parthenon, has long been deemed inadequate. Three earlier efforts to build a new museum, in 1976, 1979 and 1989, failed after becoming mired in legal, archaeological and political conflicts. The current museum, which required the expropriation of 25 buildings, has been in the works since 1997, and again legal difficulties delayed it — so much so that the plan to open in time for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics is now ancient history.

But Dimitrios Pandermalis, the president of the museum project, says the first visitors will be allowed in early next year, and the museum will have a grand opening sometime in early 2009. At which point, perhaps, arguments about the building will give way to the building’s basic argument. Which is simple: Greece wants the marble sculptures that the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, chiseled off the Parthenon more than 200 years ago. From the ground up, the building is designed to emphasize the Greek claim that the “Elgin marbles” should be returned to Athens, to join together in one place as much of the surviving Parthenon statuary as can be assembled.

Read full article (Washington Post, October 7, 2007)

They’re building not one Newseum, but two. One is made of glass and steel, and is under construction on Pennsylvania Avenue, with a stunning view of the Capitol. The other is made of pixels and bandwidth, and is under construction on a three-dimensional private island on the Web.

This parallel reality looks like an animated movie, except you get to direct your character yourself. He walks wherever you choose, looks at whatever you want to see and fiddles with objects any way you fancy.

In a test run, your character is a muscular young man wearing a green T-shirt and bluejeans. You and he gaze at front pages of the Boston Globe and the American Press of Lake Charles, La. You make him amble past a headline from the day Ronald Reagan died, then play with some fancy interactive devices that allow you, through him, to control what the Newseum shows.

Then, at your command, he does the most astonishing thing. He stretches his arms and flies. Your alter ego soars out of the place like a raptor, and you’re with him all the way, pausing to gaze down at the 74-foot-tall Tennessee marble wall with its chiseled First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .”

This novel way to experience a museum is still a hush-hush project. It is a simulacrum of the physical Newseum being erected in “Second Life” — that pioneering testbed of the “metaverse,” as the three-dimensional portion of the Web is known.

It raises questions about the very future of museums. Indeed, it can make one ponder whether all those granite and limestone mausoleums that litter Washington have a future at all.

In the age of the networked computer, museums are being fundamentally challenged in the same ways that other bastions of education and entertainment — from libraries to the music industry — are being rocked to their cores.

Read full article (Washington Post, October 7, 2007)