Acropolis Museum

This museum was built to win an argument. For decades, the British Museum's main defense for keeping the Elgin Marbles was that Greece lacked a suitable facility to house them. In 2009, Athens called that bluff with a $130 million museum designed by Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi — a modernist glass-and-concrete building that is itself an architectural masterpiece and sits 300 meters from the Parthenon with a clear sightline to the temple.

The top floor is the knockout punch. Tschumi rotated the entire Parthenon Gallery to match the exact cardinal orientation of the real building. The marble friezes and pediment sculptures are displayed at the same height and in the same relationship to each other as they were on the original temple, with plaster casts filling in the gaps where the originals sit in London. The effect is devastating — you can see precisely what's missing and exactly where it belongs. Natural light floods through floor-to-ceiling glass walls on all four sides, replicating the open-air conditions under which the sculptures were originally seen.

The building sits on pilotis (concrete stilts) above an archaeological excavation of an ancient Athenian neighborhood that was discovered during construction. Rather than destroy the ruins, Tschumi raised the building above them and installed glass floors so visitors walk over houses, workshops, and baths dating from the Classical era through Byzantine times. The excavation was opened to the public in 2019.

Among the 4,000 objects on display, the Caryatids are the stars — five of the six original maidens from the Erechtheion, displayed behind glass in a climate-controlled gallery where you can walk around them and see details invisible on the Acropolis. The sixth is in London. A plaster cast stands in her place, waiting.