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The Acropolis 
Athens, Greece
 page updated July 8, 2011
The 
Setting
Acropolis, Athens, Greece (view southeastward) The Acropolis in Athens, Greece, has had a long history of human occupation.  Over the course of millennia, the outcropping of rock that dominates the ancient city has been frequently reconfigured.  At the same time, the top of the outcrop has seen a myriad of buildings, sculptures, and miscellaneous monuments of numerous kinds.  The history of the complex of structures and artwork that crowned the Acropolis has been and continues to be studied by students and scholars.  Analyses of the history and organization of the monuments on the Acropolis continues to fascinate. 

LEARNING SITES has been asked three separate times to work on modeling aspects of the Acropolis, resulting in three progressively more detailed 3D visualizations.
The map at the left is oriented over the Acropolis (the light green shaded area).  If you turn on Satellite view and then zoom in you will be able to view the current remains on the hill (the marker points to the east porch of the Parthenon).
Various images extracted from our 3D models of the Acropolis (including, renderings, an animation, and the virtual world) are available for purchase from the Institute for the Visualization of History (www.vizin.org; click on the Products button). The images are ready to use in any noncommercial educational context.
The Projects 2009: Continued expansion of the model, most notably the addition of the grand flight of steps leading up into the Propylaea.

2003: A set of refinements and elaborations to our original massing model, most noteably, the addition of the Temple of Athena Nike to the model and the elaboration of the Parthenon (including the addition of color and sculpture).

1999 - 2001: A massing model to determine the placement and meaning of the Old Athena Temple (which seems to have survived the Persian destruction, and lasted, surprisingly undetected, until finally swept away in the early 1820s).

"[Learning Sites was] not to produce an illustration. The model's value resides in the same reasons why modeling is standard practice in schools of architecture: it provides means of checking information and, most of all, of visualizing what one has in mind. It was important to reckon with the visual impact of the archaic Temple upon the Classical structures surrounding it. Most of all, accurate modeling that took into account all available data would reveal any existing evidence to refute the argument that the temple could not have stood in that location after the Persian invasion."

(Gloria Pinney, 2006, about the benefits of 3D images)

 
Reference Information

page created: April 28, 2003
page updated: July 8, 2011
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