Propylaea
The Propylaea is the gateway to the Acropolis, built straight after the Parthenon. Mnesicles solved a difficult problem: a monumental entrance on a steep slope. Doric façades outside and Ionic columns inside meet in a building that was never quite finished.
Construction began in 437 BC, the year work on the Parthenon entered its final stage. The architect was Mnesicles, one of the few Greek architects whose name we know from contemporary sources. Like the Parthenon, the gateway was built of Pentelic marble, with touches of dark limestone from Eleusis. Work stopped in 432 BC, probably because of the cost and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Several blocks still bear the projecting bosses that were used for lifting and would have been cut away once the building was complete.
The building consists of a central gate hall with two façades in the form of six-columned Doric temple fronts. Because the ground rises, the inner façade stands higher than the outer one. Through the hall runs a passage lined with Ionic columns, slimmer and taller than the Doric ones, so that they reach the higher ceiling. The central opening is wider than the others and has no steps, so that processions, carts and sacrificial animals could pass. Wings were to frame the gateway on either side. The north wing was built and was known in antiquity as the Pinakotheke because it displayed paintings. The south wing ended up smaller than planned, perhaps so as not to encroach on the sanctuary of Athena Nike next to it.
In the Middle Ages the Propylaea became the seat of the city’s government and later a palace for the Frankish dukes of Athens, who built a tall tower beside it. In Ottoman times the building was used as a powder magazine, and an explosion in 1656 badly damaged it. The tower was demolished in the 1870s to make room for the ancient remains again. Since the 1980s the gateway has been restored piece by piece. The Propylaea became a model for monumental gateways in neoclassicism, most clearly the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the Propyläen in Munich.