A vision for the new Acropolis Museum

It somehow seems fitting that a museum built to showcase the architectural legacy of a temple honouring the warrior goddess Athena should itself be the outcome of numerous battles, some as yet unresolved.

For instance, Greek authorities required not one but four bare-knuckled design competitions - the first held more than 30 years ago - before deciding architects Bernard Tschumi of New York and Athens-based Michael Photiadis would bear the responsibility of creating the New Acropolis Museum.

Soon after, however, the battleground shifted to the courts, where several legal actions delayed construction.

And lest we forget, there remains the ongoing tug-of-war over the Parthenon's so-called Elgin Marbles. Removed from Greece 200 years ago, the priceless artefacts include a 75m segment of the celebrated temple's frieze - very close to half of the original's 160m overall length. It is now enshrined in London's British Museum, and Greece and the New Acropolis Museum very much want it repatriated.

The museum is in the final merciful throes of preparation for an official opening at the end of this year, or in early 2009, and its designers are justifiably proud.

In a recent, wide-ranging interview, Photiadis sat down at his headquarters in the northern suburb of Drafi to shed light on what inspired the museum's dramatic lines.

There has been no shortage of critics who have wondered aloud why the building was not constructed in the classical Doric style of the Parthenon.

"It's a building that does not try to ape anything," Photiadis says emphatically. "The idea was not to make a building that would speak for itself in a certain manner, " he says of the simple yet angular exterior. "It doesn't 'show' as having a certain style - it's a shell that houses some very important exhibits."

No mere 'shell'

The new museum is hardly "a shell", although Photiadis' modesty reflects the design team's original marching orders.

The building, he explains, had to be conceived "from the inside out" so that the artefacts were considered first before architectural concepts.

The result is an odd but aesthetically pleasing space. The trapezoidal clearing left behind, once a number of private residences were expropriated and demolished, left Photiadis and his associates with little room to play.

From overhead the museum looks as if it first had to be greased on all sides before it could be shoehorned into the cramped space allotted. But on the ground, the visitor does not feel the least bit confined. Rather the opposite.

The exterior grounds are adequately spacious, the interior positively cavernous - not unlike an airport terminal but without the typical impersonal frigidity. Instead, there's a solemn dignity to the space, similar to what one might experience in a temple of stature.

By necessity, the New Acropolis Museum had to be a large building. Much of that has to do with the fact the Parthenon frieze was to be displayed in its original, 2,500-year-old full-length entirety.

As a result, the three-storey structure is capped by the museological equivalent of a large greenhouse - a third-storey mass of glass, in effect a climate-control nightmare, albeit one that was overcome with an innovative air-circulation system that keeps the glass hall refrigerator-cool.

Rather cleverly, Tschumi and Photiadis chose to misalign the top floor with the rest of the museum and instead position it so that the displayed frieze would be precisely aligned with the Parthenon - and as such struck by sunlight and shadow as it had been from the day of its conception.

Tinted duplicates of the frieze's missing metopes will be displayed alongside Greece's originals for as long as th