The new national museum of modern art in greece. EMST

On the banks of the river Ilissus (presently Kallirrois Avenue), just a little further from the fountain of Nymph Kallirroe, EMST comes to inhabit one of the most remarkable samples of Greek Modern Architecture, the old FIX brewery, a work of the architect Takis Zenetos. Something new is being born through such intercourse. The facades designed by Takis Zenetos on Syggrou and Frantzi are maintained. The two new views of the building reveal and restore the forgotten topography of Athens. The "section" of Ilissus, namely water, the river bed with the sedimentary bed rock as it has developed after such centuries- long subsidence, appears again, it "re-emerges" from the soil and is suspended as a giant "curtain"- within its folds the Museum exhibition spaces lie hidden.  In is lower part and on the ground floor level, a water wall slides into the vacuum between the volume of the exhibition and the ground.

Today the FIX building "floats" amidst a sea of vehicles. A narrow pavement, which encircles it as far as the "wake of the boat" and the area of the Transit Station constitute its surrounding space. As it lacks in space outside, this is offered inside, within the interior. The Museum returns to the city what it has taken away: a foyer and a space of "epic" dimensions (almost 30 m high), which reveals perpendicularly in the interior of the building "the archaeological findings of the plot": Zenetos's view on Syggrou. From the top floor one can reach the first level of the chamber and hence move up to the Sculpture Gallery from the outdoor. The latter inhabits the "ground" of a garden-labyrinth, which reveals furtive views to selected points of Athens

The Museum as an edifice is not a tabula rasa where it is unimportant whether one is in Helsinki, Barcelona or London. It is a significant element of the preservation of the city's collective memory. The past, as it is maintained in the Fix building cannot naturally be kept intact; if so it would be a Fix building museum. But the fact that the building has now been constructed to serve another purpose and is transformed into a Museum of contemporary art signifies that the space bears the memories of the period of its birth and it is hence enriched.