New Archaeological Museum of Delos

Student: George Teknakis
Supervisor: Richard Wright
University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Presentation date: June 2011

This project presents the proposal of a new archaeological museum in the island of Delos.

Delos is a rocky island situated in the Aegean Sea, Greece. It is one of the most important archaeological and historical sites in Mediterranean Sea. Today is an uninhabited island and many tourists visit it. During a long period of time the island was under a violent procedure. The first houses were built on 3000 years B.C, they were rebuilt, buried; later on other houses built on the top of first houses and finally destroyed on 70 B.C and covered by soil gradually in the next 2000 years.

In 1900 ruins started being revealed by archaeologists and new houses were built on the top of unrevealed ruins for their needs. Today only half of the existing ruins have been revealed. Visitors arrive in the pier and follow a route suggested by archaeologists that picks the most important ruins. At the moment the existing museum is a rather small and inadequate building for the needs of the place. Both the existing museum and archaeologist's houses sit on the top of uncovered ruins. Also a lot of ruins sit on top of over other ruins from different periods of time creating an amazing and thus complex layering system.

The new proposal is using the program of the existing museum and is distributed around the site with a series of pavilions that sit on the top of the archaeological site (revealed areas) in locations that are associated with the original place of artifacts. So, by exploring the tradition of layering, a new layer is added on the top of the existing layers. Moreover by removing the existing museum and archaeologists' houses we allow more excavations to be operated. A transcript of the movement around the site has been created in order to analyze, describe and finally locate the new pavilions.

The proposal consists of eight pavilions. Six of them stand on the top of revealed ruins and the other two - the main building and arrival point - sit out of the archaeological site. All of them reflect underneath space. The pavilions over ruins pop up as a continuity of underneath ancient patterns and the rest two become part of the route. The arrival pavilion located at the pier and the main building on top of the hill overlooking the archaeological site. Visitors can now follow the route into the archaeological site visiting the various pavilions and standing over the ruins locating the artifacts into their original location by looking through the transparent floors and slot windows keeping a constant reference with the ruins. So they gain the maximum information about the different parts of ancient city and artifacts as well.