The wide glass and concrete building on the corner is the Acropolis Museum, and the glass box sitting on top of it is crooked. Everything underneath lines up neatly with the street, while the top floor sits at an angle to all of it, as though somebody had set it down slightly wrong.
It's turned twenty-three degrees, and it's turned to face the Parthenon. Stand square to the street, sight along the edge of that top floor, and it points you straight up at the rock.
That top floor is a room built to the exact footprint of the Parthenon's inner chamber, with glass walls all the way round. The sculpted frieze is mounted on the outside of that core, in the order it ran on the building, at the height it ran, lit by the same daylight. And through the glass, up on the rock, is the actual Parthenon. You look at the carving and you look at the hole it came out of, at the same time.
Downstairs, the whole building stands on columns over a hole in the ground. When they dug the foundations they hi
t an ancient Athenian neighbourhood — streets, houses, drains, a bath complex. So they left it there and built above it on stilts, and the entrance floor is glass. You walk in over somebody's front room.
This building is an argument, and that is precisely what it was built to be.
For most of the last two centuries, the case for keeping the Parthenon sculptures in London included a practical stra
