DESIGNER MANUAL
CONTENTS
About the Museum...............................................................4 Personal line of research....................................................8 Sketches and prototypes..................................................10 Patterns...................................................................................13
About the Museum
The present building took form gradually in the 20th century with a series of additions on the east side. The collection and protection of antiquities was one of the first and foremost concerns of the newly founded Greek state, which set up its first museum on Aegina in 1829. However, when the capital of the Modern Greece was transferred from Nauplion to Athens, where the concentration of ancient temples and public buildings had led to the creation of notable collections, the need to establish a Central Museum for Antiquities became imperative.
The National Archaeological Museum of Athens is the largest archaeological museum in Greece and one of the most important museums in the world devoted to ancient Greek art. It was founded at the end of the 19th century to house and protect antiquities from all over Greece, thus displaying their historical, cultural and artistic value. The Museum building, a protected monument in itself, was founded in 1866 on a plot donated by Eleni Tositsa. Its construction was based on designs by the architects Ludwig Lange and Panagi Kalkos. The final form of its facade was the work of Ernst Ziller, who also supervised the work until 1889, when the west wing was completed.
The National Archaeological Museum was founded by presidential decree on August 9, 1893 (Greek Government Journal I, 152, ‘On the organization of the National Archaeological Museum’). Its purpose was ‘the study and teaching of the science of archaeology, the propagation of archaeological knowledge and the cultivation of a love for the Fine Arts’. Its collections were segregated into: Sculpture, vases, clay and bronze figurines and other ancient Figurines made of various materials, Inscriptions, which later went to the Epigraphic Museum, Pre-Hellenic (the Mycenaean collection), and Egyptian.
The National Archaeological Museum is the largest museum in Greece and one of the world’s great museums. Although its original purpose was to secure all the finds from the nineteenth century excavations in and around Athens, it gradually became the central National Archaeological Museum and was enriched with finds from all over Greece. Its abundant collections, with more than 11,000 exhibits, provide a panorama of Greek civilization from the beginnings of Prehistory to Late Antiquity. The museum is housed in an imposing neoclassical building of the end of the nineteenth century, which was designed by L. Lange and remodelled by Ernst Ziller. The vast exhibition space - numerous galleries on each floor accounting for a total of 8,000 square metres - house five large permanent collections: The Prehistoric Collection, which includes works of the great civilizations that developped in the Aegean from the sixth millennium BC to 1050 BC (Neolithic, Cycladic, Mycenaean), and finds from the prehistoric settlement at Thera.
The Vase and Minor Objects Collection, which contains representative works of ancient Greek pottery from the eleventh century BC to the Roman period and includes the Stathatos Collection, a corpus of minor objects of all periods. The museum was also equipped with conservation laboratories and a cast workshop.
The Sculptures Collection, which shows the development of ancient Greek sculpture from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC with unique masterpieces. The Metallurgy Collection, with many fundamental statues, figurines and minor objects. And, finally, the only Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities Collection in Greece, with works dating from the pre-dynastic period (5000 BC) to the Roman conquest.
With the declaration of the Second World War in 1939, the museum’s antiquities were stored for safety in the museum itself, the vaults in the Bank of Greece and in natural grottos. At the end of the war, the museum’s director Christos Karouzos undertook the re-exposition of the exhibits and the architect P. Karantinos remodeled the exhibition spaces. During that time the temporary display was limited to ten rooms of the east wing. Christos and Semni Karouzou completed the re-exposition in 1964, having created an exemplary display of the development of ancient Greek art from prehistory to the Roman period. The unique Greek collection of Egyptian antiquities was exhibited for the first time thirty years later, in 1994.
Personal line of research
For this project, I decided to use the visual resources of the arts pieces that can be found at the Museum, like textures or decorations of the statues, or photographies of some specific parts of those. First of all, we were requested to design a logo for the 150 year anniversary of the National Archaeological Museum, which would appear in all the packagings for products of the museum gift shop and the advertising poster related to the event that we had to desgin. After many different designs, here we can see the final result, with black background added so the letters can be seen. After this, we had to choose 5 products and design a packaging for each one of them, keeping some elements in common. In my case, I prefered to keep the same visual appearance, and change only the size of the packagings, in order to create a visually unified set of products. The five works I decided to design where: 1. The box of a coffee mug. / 2. The box of a book about the 150 anniversary of the NAM. / 3. The box of a small cycladic statue. / 4. The box for a small stone table. / 5. A poster keeper.
Sketches and prototypes
First drafts for the 150 years logo.
Design trials for the 150 years anniversary.
Patterns
Pattern of the CD Case.
DESIGNER’S MANUAL
Pattern of the Designer’s Manual.
Pattern of the advertising poster.
Pattern of the poster keeper #1
Pattern of the poster keeper #2
Pattern of the 150 Anniversary Book Box #1.
Pattern of the 150 Anniversary Book Box #2.
Pattern of the 150 Anniversary Book Box #2.
Pattern of the Gift bag #1.
Pattern of the Gift bag #2.
Alberto MartĂnez Plaza, 2016 for the subject
Packaging and Branding