The quest for a new museum—a cartography of the shifting organizations of collaboration in the case of the New Acropolis Museum

Abstract

This article presents the case of the New Acropolis Museum, one of the most important cultural works for contemporary urban development in Greece. We present a comparative study of the briefs and winning projects of the international architectural competition in 1989 and the tender for the architectural, engineering and electromechanical studies in 2000. We use assemblage theory as a theoretical basis for studying the two procurement processes. We illustrate how the diverse changes—changes related with costs, quality, technical complexity, and uncertainty—influenced directly the choice and the organization of the procedures. These different procedural organizations framed, in different ways, the selection of solutions, the project realization and thus the quality of urban space. By studying the links between the selection of procurement processes, their organization and their results, we shed light on the trajectories between the initial problems, the actors, and the priorities and we increase our understanding of the relation between the procurement process and the project realization.