A Copenhagen-trained Dane who spent eight years in Athens and the rest of his life in Vienna, Hansen is the architect through whom nineteenth-century Greece acquired a public architecture in the image of its own antiquity. He arrived in Athens in 1838 to study and restore Byzantine and classical monuments, built the National Observatory and, later from Vienna, the Academy of Athens, which with Ernst Ziller’s execution and his brother Christian’s University forms the marble group known as the Athenian Trilogy. In Vienna he built the Parliament, the Musikverein, the Stock Exchange and the Heinrichshof along the Ringstrasse. His classicism is archaeological rather than nostalgic: he reinstated the painted polychromy that nineteenth-century excavation had shown Greek temples once carried, against a profession that preferred them white.
