The Parthenon and Classical Greece
I did much work from the mid 1990s on the architectural world of Classical Greece, generated initially by the commission from Phaidon for a book on The Parthenon which, unfortunately they did not publish.
I particularly followed three strands:
“Looking at the Parthenon”
Studies in actually seeing the real building and what it signified when first built. A long essay with this title, incorporating a major portion of the Phaidon manuscript was published in The Journal of Architecture (RIBA Research Journal, E & FN Spon), Vol 2 (1997-8), No. 2, Summer 1997, 161-187 online here and the full text can be read and downloaded here.
“Searching for the Parthenon”
Studies tracing a thread of its complex swirling mists of signification back from the late 20th Century – via Le Corbusier, Sigmund Freud’s visit (“so it really is here!”), Lord Elgin, the mosque, the church, the tourist site for Romans – a reverse chronology to the 5th Century BCE.
One essay in this theme was published in Italian and English texts in 1998: In cerca del Partenone/Searching for The Parthenon’, Spazio e Societa (Milano), Anno XX, No. 83, July-September 1998, 10-27
“Standing and sitting on the Akropolis”
Using the two great Athenian akropolis temples to muse on the dialectic between an architecture which stands and one which sits. This became the base of my inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Brighton in 1997
But much, including the book commissioned by Phaidon, has not been published.
Other published review essays include:
‘Messages from the Periclean acropolis’, extended review of Architecture and meaning on the Athenian Acropolis (Rhodes), in The Architects’ Journal, vol 204, 24 October 1996 p42.
