Academy of Athens building

The building was paid for by Simon Sinas, a Greek banker in Vienna, and was known for years as the Sinaian Academy; its foundations were laid in 1859 and it took twenty-six years to finish. Hansen had spent eight years in Athens measuring and restoring ancient monuments before moving to Vienna, and the design is an archaeologist’s classicism rather than a nostalgic one. The Ionic order is taken from the Erechtheion, the whole is faced in Pentelic marble from the quarry that supplied the Parthenon, and — the point most often missed — the entablature, coffers and acroteria were painted in red, blue and gold, because nineteenth-century excavation had proved that Greek temples were polychrome. Two votive columns carry Athena and Apollo by Leonidas Drosis; Plato and Socrates sit below. Handed to the Greek state in 1887, the building waited until 1926 for the academy it had been built to house. With Hansen’s brother Christian’s University and the National Library it forms the Athenian Trilogy.