Vedasri Siddamsetty

If there was a dream come true, it was visiting the Acropolis in Athens. Sir Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture puts forth some recommendations for architects to study, but even while studying, the Temple of Athena in the Acropolis of Athens stands out spectacularly. Just like the Eiffel tower that follows one everywhere in Paris, the Acropolis of Athens follows one everywhere while in Athens. It is poised, enigmatic and towering in its presence. I do always feel how difficult it would be for the current generations to live amongst such creations in Europe. What pressure to create!

Touted as the most perfect building ever built, the magnanimity of the Parthenon, built in tribute to the Greek Goddess Athena Parthenos, or the Goddess of Wisdom, the Temple of Athena is profound. No line of the building employed in its construction and design is a straight line, the columns are not of the same measurement from the bottom to the top. They are narrower at the top and broader at the bottom but because of the nature of optical illusion they seem to be equally proportioned. The concept of Golden Ratio that is a proportion of 1:1.618 and the nature of all beauty in nature follows that proportion was found in ancient Greece. The Temple of Athena’s floor plan follows this very ratio as do the other temples in the Acropolis. Most of the other temples like the roof of the Parthenon have been decimated, unfortunately, yet they retain their splendour with the range of Doric, Iconic and Corinthian columns that line the fringe of the plan. From a corner the angle of the Parthenon reaches out to the sky. The use of about 100000 tons of white marble from the nearby quarries makes the Acropolis of Athens stunning and ethereal.

Athena, a virgin Goddess is given all the best qualities, to inspire the people with a persona of goodness. She is said to have emerged from the head of her father Zeus and was also his favourite. As the legend has it, the prima God Zeus once had a terrible headache that bothered him unyieldingly, then one day his splitting headache literally caused his head to split from which emerged Athena! She was extremely loved by the people, in Homer’s Illiad, she is depicted as a war Goddess, with rare military prowess, representing the intellectual and civilized side of war, she is the divine form of the heroic, martial ideal and personifies excellence in close combat, victory, and glory. A huge statue of Athena is said to have been inside the Parthenon. One fact that struck me at the Parthenon was that no matter how lofty the statue, or the column or the building, in ancient Greece they were all broken down into smaller cubes or cuboids and fitted into each other to form a complete whole. The beauty in their fixing did not even reveal the joints, and the nature of their dry fixing is why they have probably even lasted all these years. Its like a lego town in action, except this was all in stone. Even the ancient civilisations in Egypt seem to have had a major influence on the ancient civilisation of Greece with the towering proportions. The pinnacle of achievement that the Parthenon displays may have been humbled by the future generations, yet it embodies a spirit that is far more crucial, standing the test of time, even as the Ottomans stored gunpowder and ammunition, accidentally firing a missile into the roof of the Parthenon and blasting off. In war and moments of anger such precious constructs can be lost, quite mindlessly! The beautiful Parthenon is poetry is a stationary mode, it is brilliant. Even with eighteen thousand tourists that visited it the day we were there, it held its power, its stance, highly unaffected and unbothered by the furor it created! It withheld the ammunition to an extent but I wonder if it can withhold the footfall that it receives, day after day, year after year. But unfortunately in architecture seeing is believing and then understanding. My textbooks allayed in me a strong preference for the Ionic column, the slender column with a capital in two curves coiling along the golden ratio, but in reality the beauty of the simply well-bodies Doric column is unsurpassable. The Corinthian column you ask? The one with a tidy composition of acantha leaves on its top? the celebratory one? Well, it felt too gaudy! While the Doric columns remained the Greek favourite, employed all over, the Romans loved the newer Corinthian order or columns and introduced the Tuscan and the Composite columns to the mix of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders of columns. The Parthenon though applies all the three in its structure. On the outside are the fluted mighty Doric columns. Today to restore the columns cost a huge sum of money and unless 80% of the original pieces of the column are found the archeologists do not assemble the random rubble that it seems. The fluted design on the Doric column is very tactile, a design phenomena that is rage in today’s glass too, but in stone, it feels phenomenal. The Carytids as an architectural support, or the depiction of female stature carrying the roof of the temple instead of the columns are striking. It would have to be my favorite feature that I found on the Acropolis in the Erechtheion. The frieze or the triangular panel that is found atop the Doric columns has been damaged, yet the pieces that remain are exhibitory of the fine nature of workmanship. Pieces of the frieze on the pediment can be seen assembled in the Museum of the Acropolis at the foot of the Cecropia, the hill of the Acropolis was named after the serpant-man Cecrops.

The Museum of the Acropolis is quite something. While the museums of the archeological sites of Delphi and Epidaurus are enchanting, well Socrates is found in Delphi, the museum of the Acropolis has been designed atop the archeological remains of a marketplace and the glazed floors allows one to levitate over the marketplace. The Museum was designed to capture the interest of the visitors and present the Greek splendour in all its shambles and ruins. I do not know why people travel, amongst the 18000 people on the day and hour we were there (8 AM in the morning, obviously we waited for the crowd to thin to actually engage with this marvellous piece of architecture) I overheard several conversations, where a bunch of people were saying, “why do we need to know the orders of the columns, what use will it ever be to us?” Literally groaning as they climbed. Well, the asymmetric nature of gain or loss is the truth, and I do hope that the tourists who dont need or want to know dont crowd the architectural sights leaving them for us architects or history enthusiasts then, for architecture, places or spaces is my only reason as such to travel! Learning architecture through textbooks is a joke, the learning of architecture happens through understanding and that is felt only in realtime in the real place, no AI can make up for the reality of it. The way the light falls, the time of the day, the person in question, their perception, perspective, all of it matters and cannot be replicated in 8k with Dolby Atmos too. Otherwise why bother the environment with fuel and the un-sustainability of travel.