Word: parthenon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...toured the ancient Agora and struck a snapshot pose at the grounds where Pericles once preached the wonders of democracy. You've bought a lamp of Aphrodite with a clock mounted in her belly, and you've paid $8.99 for a slice of mousaka that tastes like the rubber Parthenon you picked up for the folks back home. What next? Get out, out of the tourist rat-runs and into Psirri and Votanikos. There lie the liveliest new quarters of old Athens. Once home to the country's best craftsmen, Psirri, a honeycomb of one-room workshops, barbershops, tobacconists...
...most louche-looking restaurant in town. The plump, red couches have even the most starched of customers slouching like lounge lizards. The wine list would make Dionysus' toes curl, and the nouvelle Greek cuisine is affordable and appetizing. Best of all, it won't taste like the rubber Parthenon you picked up earlier...
This stands, however, only as a subjective (and shortly, sentimental) judgment. The smooth columns of Widener and the short descent to the Tercentenary Theater need not universally recall the tongue-and-grooved columns at the Acropolis' entrance, a good 10 minutes' walk from level ground. Roofed Pusey's no Parthenon, and Harvard Square--for all its memorabilia--hardly Plaka; and the comparative praises of higher learning have already been sung. So I will risk the addition of hyperbole to say that the Athens of Greece and America are responsible for my working notion of history...
There are architects who love the Parthenon. Greg Lynn has a thing for the blob. This would not only be the '50s sci-fi thriller about a belligerent wad of jelly. The blobs that beguile him are any "isomorphic polysurfaces," meaning shapes that are, well, blobs. Architecture is a profession in which the cube and sphere are still the literal building blocks. What Lynn prefers reminds you of amoebas and bundled foam. In the most pliant forms of nature, in very irregular geometry, he sees the future...
...glass Parthenon, like Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, or an elaborately "timeless" spatial event, like Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is not an operatic signature building, like Frank Gehry's titanium-sheathed meganautilus in Bilbao, Spain. Still less is it a feat of conspicuously externalized luxury, like Richard Meier's Getty Center, poised in marble aloofness above Los Angeles...