Struggling Against Crisis: The Case Study of Athens-based Museums

This paper is based on a talk I gave to the Scottish Hellenic Society April 2010. In this paper I talk about two very different museums in Athens, the exhibits in the metro stations and the new Akropoli museum. I will begin with giving a general background to the metro stations. I will then move on to some individual stations giving a little background and some information on the exhibits shown in each. The last station to be discussed is the Akropoli station which will bring us to the new Akropoli Museum.

2022

This thesis is about museums and crisis. Through research on the Imperial War Museum, known today as IWM, during the Second World War era, 1933-1950, it reveals how crises disrupt museums, and the contrasting defensive and revolutionary strategies which museums must adopt when mitigating crisis situations. The thesis is situated in a small but emergent literature concerning museums and crisis. Existing work comprises contemporary case studies on difficult museum experiences, predominantly financial difficulty, wherein crisis has been applied to describe an institution’s general state of organisational malaise. This thesis, by contrast, is innovative in that it comprises a historical case study on a museum facing wholesale physical and ideological collapse, and deploys newly developed crisis concepts to analyse different critical situations that can impact museums and to analyse the pathology underlying them. It draws on methodology informed by various case study, archival and historical theorists, and is produced using data extracted principally from documentary sources researched at the IWM museum archive and The National Archives. Through investigating the experience of the Imperial War Museum during the Second World War era, this thesis finds that museums can be harmed by two crisis types. The first comprises a surface-defensive crisis, where the impacted museum must rebut the crisis effects. This type was conceived through considering the impact of the wartime aerial attacks against London on the Imperial War Museum. The second type comprises a deep-revolutionary crisis, where the museum must transition from its existing crisis-ridden state to some new, more sustainable paradigm. This type was conceived through considering the threats posed by cultural irrelevancy, perceived during the war, against the Imperial War Museum after the conflict. Delivered via an original synthesis of historical, museological and crisis research, the outcome of these findings comprises a novel understanding of crisis in the museum context.

Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies , Vol. 1, No. 3 (2013), pp. 242-245

2008

ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research VIII/2, 2014

This study is concerned with the New Acropolis Museum, which was opened in June 2009 in Athens. The New Acropolis Museum, out of all of the world’s new museum structures of the past century, has dramatically intensified the issue of the relationship between parts and the whole, between the building and its integration into the setting, between the museum function and the historical city, which is a protected heritage site, one treated as a museum exhibit. With the New Acropolis Museum as an example, the study would like to highlight the complexity and the ambiguity of the present-day relationship between the heritage protection, the museumisation of art and the design of our environment. The particular attention is focused on the vivid debate about the building and the distinguishing the differences between traditionalist and modernist views of architecture manifested in this debate. These differences are deeper rooted than many people have been willing to admit.

2003

The way museums present themselves to society nowadays does not match the definitions which have been ascribed to them. The majority of museums has adopted, even if automatically, a business-like behavior, in order to cope with the State’s economic and financial constraints. This has led them to create a new acting paradigm. With the collapse of the Welfare-State, also reflected in the lack of support to culture, those in charge of the cultural heritage were forced to innovate and to adapt themselves to different management models. A new concept of museum was created. We are now witnessing a new age in museology. As a result of these transformations, museums have become closer to local communities and more attentive to stakeholders, the interested parties. From this connection, emerged natural partnership and collaboration bonds, which can be referred to as strategic philanthropy or causes’ marketing. With this study we aim at showing how financial crisis is related to “cultural innovation”

in collaboration with Panayotis Protopsaltis 3rd PhD Symposium on Contemporary Greece: Structures, Context and Challenges, London, 2007 London School of Economics and Political Science, Hellenic Observatory