The Parthenon is a marble building created by the Greeks to demonstrate their strength and prosperity. After being shot at, looted, exploded, set on fire, transformed for multiple purposes and survived earthquakes, it is at the brink of collapse. Therefore, a restoration team has set on a mission for the past 30 years to bring this building to its former glory in the most faithful way possible. By doing so they incorporate both new and old methods while they try to uncover the mysteries of how it was originally built with such speed and precision. What is the impact this monument has on society today and why is it so important that it is restored properly?
This icon of western civilization is one of the most copied buildings in the world, inspiring banks, government buildings, and many other around the globe. It is both a great architectural and engineering mystery that boggles the minds of many today, teaching new people old tricks. This building represents the great triumphs of the past while incorporating new elements due to the restorations taken place. However, before one can imitate such task of restoring the building, one must dig into the past and understand how it came to be.
The Parthenon looks perfectly symmetrical and straight, nonetheless there are rarely any straight lines in the building and few 90 degree angles. This is due to the idea that they used optical illusions and optical refinement to make it appear perfect. Alongside, they used an ideal body to ensure a standard measurement, and used the golden ratio of 1 to 1.6 and the 4 to 9 ratio for the pillars, the lengths and widths in general. Nowadays it is believed that to achieve the precision they achieved, they scaled down to 1/16th on the length but not the width. Despite being built in the past, it is so advanced, that every single piece is unique and not even a computer can detect and identify which piece is which and where it goes, meaning that everything done in the restoration today is by eye and hand. Even by implementing tools used when originally created to ensure its faithfulness to the design.
After years of studying such building and all its details, despite all the techniques incorporated and discovered, it is still a very big mystery of how it was built. These discoveries open a new gateway on how to do things more efficiently and create buildings with the same base elements, leading not only to the visual attributes to be mimicked, but also the physical and technical part of it. By looking into the past we learned how to move on correctly in the future, because if not, we leave space for error and may end up doing more damage than intended. As referred to, the Parthenon is a gigantic puzzle, and since there are no instructions on how to put it back together, one must look back at how it was created, for what purposes what it made for, and what specific characteristics it has that could help identify a pattern to help solve the puzzle.
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