I recall stopping in at the Starbucks down the road to do some work, and while examining the Nashville map, we wondered what they meant by "The Parthenon". Turns out of course that it wasn't anything else but The Parthenon.
Similar for us when we plotted our route from Joshua Tree to Grand Canyon and discovered there is a London Bridge on some reservoir lake along the way.
The joke, at least on this side of the pond, is that the Americans thought they were buying Tower Bridge.
The London Bridge at Lake Havasu is the New London Bridge, which has been replaced by the Modern London Bridge. Some pedestrian alcoves from the Old London Bridge were rescued, and are in Victoria Park and at King's College's Guy's Campus.
Fun fact: After the Greeks beat the Persians, they created a union of state-cities, called the Delian league [1] to protect against future attacks. It was named so because the gatherings were happing at Delos, a Greek island. Many state-cities had contributed to a fund that was to be used for guarding against future Persian attacks. Shortly after the league's creation, Pericles moved its base to Athens, and the story goes that part of that fund (the equivalent of today's $4 billion) was used to build Parthenon.
Notably, to build the Parthenon instead of funding defense against Persian attacks.
This generated dissent among other members of the Delian League, who soon discovered that, having handed their defense budgets over to Athens, they were now only tributaries, and were invaded by Athens when they tried to leave the League.
One huge difference between Nashville’s Parthenon and the real one is that at the real one you have to hike for 30min on an ancient road, pass through many old ruins, before you get to it. It’s epic. The one in Nashville has a gigantic parking lot full of tour busses, complete with a hot dog stand.
You can't go in to the real one. The real one was destroyed in 1687 when it was being used as a gunpowder depot(!), and then triggered by a mortar round.
They've been slowly rebuilding it over the last 50 years, but it's nowhere near done. It involves figuring out where each and every block goes, often undoing previous reconstructions. You won't be going inside it any time soon.
There are gift shops everywhere, of course, but I highly recommend the one at the Acropolis Museum (at the bottom of the hill). It does a great job of putting the site into historical and archeological context.
No, from what I could tell the greeks have tried to preserve the entire Acropolis as it was in ancient times. Unfortunately this means there is construction equipment everywhere as they are constantly trying to rebuild, at least when I was there.
Pretty much every shop/business surrounding the Acropolis is a gift shop, they all sell little souvenirs and stuff.
I can't read German, but my recollection is that this built around the time of German unification to serve as a sort of pantheon of great Germans, with statues of great German poets, scientists, leaders, etc in the hope that this would cement a common German identity. Is that right?
I could have sworn one of the Mediterranean fascist leaders did something similar in the 20th century, but i can't find a citation.
According to Wikipedia the unification was in the 1860.
This though was built by Ludwig I. which was shortly before that (1825-1848) and according to the link above in response to the (citation link: "embarrassing") "invasion" by Napoleon, in order to fortify/ensure the "germanic identity" of the people that lived there, so that it would not "washed out" by a influx of french identity, thus also the name Walhalla.
At least that's how I understand the (very short) explanation in the above link.
“It was conceived in 1807 by Crown Prince Ludwig in order to support the gathering momentum for the unification of the many German states. Following his accession to the throne of Bavaria, construction took place between 1830 and 1842 under the supervision of the architect Leo von Klenze”
It’s a bit more off the beaten path than Nashville, but I thought Carhenge was pretty great when I stumbled upon it driving across Nebraska. https://carhenge.com/
Yes, and I just learned today that the full scale replica has acoustic properties of making it seem like voices were all around you when you spoke [0].
Since no one has mentioned it, everyone used to get stoned there in the 1970's. It was a very relaxed atmosphere. I recall one headline, "The parthenon has gone to pot."
It looks very Gothic as an open "ruin" against the sky. Nearby is a monument to Nelson as a telescope-shaped tower, the dome of a small observatory on the hill, and below that a huge neoclassical school building that has stood empty for fifty years.
Fortunately New St Andrews House has been demolished - it being one of the ugliest buildings in Edinburgh. One thing I recently learned is that the site almost became RBS headquarters!
Should do more of this. Like saving seeds or freezing DNA of endangered animals. Why not reproduce/model antique structures for all to see as they once were? Else we're left with a melancholy view of the past as destroyed or derelict. Which is and unfair view of peoples of the past that build great things.
It is not an exact replica, it is made from concrete, and given the time it took to recreate and the fact that it was partly funded by donations, I would say it was made from a vantage point of love and admiration for the original.
Oscar Wilde said it best: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
So? Its educational, interesting and valuable. Thousands of people see the duplicate structure that would otherwise see only the destroyed hulk in books.
And a guitar is quite different from a vast structure from antiquity? Not valuable just because they were touched by some famous dude. "Birthplace of democracy" vs "Blue Suede Shoes".
You can't take something out of the context in which it was created and strip it of it's original meaning and have the same thing.
The guitar Elvis used has the same spirit imbued into it, that his music possessed and his fans enjoyed. Any other guitar, is just a guitar. There are cars, boats, houses, ect that have this same effect of carrying a higher meaning.
Buildings have a connection to the landscape around them. Something aesthetically pleasing in architecture works in harmony with the nature/city surrounding it. Many buildings are an eyesore because they do not fit into their surroundings. Many of the british Edwardian masterpieces didn't work when recreated in australia. Parthenon works on it's original landscape.
The techniques that go into building them have a relevance to the society around them. A cathedral can be a 300yr construction cycle as a testament to entirely new building techniques like a domed roof. The first building to carry that maintains the meaning of a step forward for humanity. Subsequent buildings don't carry that meaning. Building a cathedral now with a domed roof takes like a year and is cheap, commonplace and uninteresting. The Parthenon's warped foundation to trick you into thinking it's a straight building is not an necessary technique any more, though amazing for that time period.
Museums in britian that contain all the dead art to ever be considered worth preserving tried to charge an entry fee (gold coin donation, 2015ish) instead of being free to the public and admission dropped by 25%. The value of preservation is quite low.
Texas is not the birthplace of democracy, and it is not interesting spamming out parthenons with modern tooling. The excess of modern perfection completely minimizes the original achievement, all you are preserving is the recipe-book for building that particular pattern of concrete. The only spirit a faux-parthenon in texas carries is crass commercial reproduction of long-passed european greats. Like a plastic Disney castle vaguely imitates european castles, a parthenon in Texas is a pointless attempt at claiming something the state didn't earn and can't own by definition.
Make something that is unique and special that could only be made in Texas. There are unique set of materials, landscape, people, social culture and attitudes, desires of what needs to be expressed in the culture. We only have one Texas, it needs to be Texan and not faux-greece. Any given patch of land yearns for it's own self-expression. I can't see any other way of building, nor the virtue in dropping foreign works from a great height into an empty landscape.
There's a lot of classical revival buildings around New Orleans and they fit into the landscape just fine, IMHO - visiting the Peristyle or Popp's Fountain in City Park is always super chill. They fit well into hot sweaty climates. Lots of room for a cool breeze to blow through, lots of space for hot air to rise to the ceiling.
Also, if you build a full-scale Parthenon complete with giant gilded statue of Athena, I think it is pretty arguable that you are deliberately inviting that same spirit to dwell in your city. I would bet money there have been people performing rituals to various Greek gods in the Nashville Parthenon since its inception. Admittedly I may be biased by living in a city that's been having parades in the honor of assorted Greek gods for the past hundred years or so; Mardi Gras is a heck of a thing.
Ignoring of course the reconstruction of the way it might have looked originally. Which the 'owners' of the building have not done. And which informs and can indeed inspire.
Hey the museum that holds the David has a half-dozen copies placed around the building, to help reduce the congestion of the line to see the original. Are they crass? Are they not 'earned'?
The 'owners' of the originals cannot of course remodel them to show how they looked in the past, which can be hard to understand from ruins. Folks often express regret at the damage done by one war or ruler or whatever. Yet reversing it is a bigger crime, because its a treasure.
The meaning of the reproduction is, "Hey this is how it might have looked when it was intact." Its interesting and informative. The scale of it has the same ability to inspire the scale of the original had.
We build new things all the time. Texas has many outstanding architectural treasures. That has zippo to do with this subject. Drawing a dichotomy is irrelevant, as building one doesn't preclude building the other.
That all sounds like gobbledygook. The 'spirit imbued' is made-up nonsense. So is the 'meaning'. Its a building, and its interesting and exciting to see how great structures of the past looked.
It's "educational" in the same sense that selling an action figure of the Artemision Bronze, or the Antikythera Ephebe, would be "educational", i.e. its true purpose is to make $$$ by selling an easy but empty sense of fulfillment to people who don't have the time to educate themselves, or the inclination to do it too far away from a Wendy's apparently.
I have read that the young Randall Jarrell, later a distinguished poet, critic, and novelist, served as a sculptor model when the Nashville Parthenon was going up.
I'm more surprised they didn't go in for the giant X where X is some animal or vegetable. That seems a bit more popular in some areas.
There is nothing like driving on a very foggy night and having a 45 ft chicken appear in front of you. Also, Rochester MN has a damn corn cob water tower. Being lost in that town with constantly seeing that thing was not good for the old temper.
Seems odd they don’t mention the architect at all. William Crawford Smith was an officer in the Confederate Army.
The Nazis also had an obsession with neoclassicalism. Monuments to the Greeks and Romans were a part of both southern US white nationalism and German nazism; it aims to give legitimacy to race science and claims that they are continuing some ancient tradition of greatness.
>> Why Is There a Full-Scale Replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee?
Because you can't build a monument to good taste.
Some highlights (for me):
>> (Not to be outdone, Memphis built a Pyramid as a reminder that the city was named after Memphis, Egypt.)
Inevitably.
>> Tourists and Tennesseans today get a much better look at the statue in Nashville than the plebs of ancient Greece, who are believed to have glimpsed the inside of the Greek Parthenon only on special occasions.
There were no "plebs" in Greece- only in Rome.
>> For one thing, guests walk through a park to approach the Tennessee version—perhaps after grabbing a quick lunch at a Wendy’s nearby—and they encounter it from the building’s side or front.
Ah, visiting replicas of ancient wonders while snacking on Wendy's. Peak modern era.
>> So while it feels odd to write this, it’s true: You haven’t really seen the Parthenon until you’ve been to Nashville, Tennessee.
Just as true: you haven't seen the Pyramids until you have watched The Mummy.
The Parthenon is a marvel of architectural tweaks to make it look visually straight and perfect in an imperfect setting with ancient tooling. It kind of defeats the point to remake it with modern tools on flat ground.
It's also a popular place to take pics, but it's not used as much as the rest of the park.
It's really kind of bland most days of the year and you have to tilt your neck hard to really see the cool things around the top, most of what it is eye level at the ground is not much of a different feeling than standing outside a courthouse or something. (in my not very frequent experience)
I suppose if you go inside (and that is open when you are there) - then it's more inspiring.
There might be a permission slip needed to take pro photos in that area of the park - pretty sure I saw a blurb about that somewhere over the years.
The article says full scale replica, but I was under the impression it's like a 1/3 replica... to scale, but not 1:1. I could be wrong, not an expert.
Nope. I have been there and it is a 1:1 scale. Minus the obvious modern additions like glass, a basement (For art exhibits) and gift shop, it is a full on replica of the Parthenon in the old old days.
