The usual reaction on first seeing it is to assume it is a stage set. It is not, and understanding why it is there explains considerably more about the city than the building itself does.
01 Why a Parthenon, and why here
In 1824 Philip Lindsley arrived in the city, a scholar of Latin and Greek who had been running the college of New Jersey. He took charge of an institution that the following year was renamed the University of Nashville, and brought in teachers of classics, languages, mathematics and geology.
He was the one who proposed calling the city the Athens of something. In his day he said «of the West» and «of the Southwest», because back then this was the frontier; as expansion moved towards the Pacific the nickname settled as Athens of the South, backed by the number of teaching institutions that piled up here.
The nickname left marks before the Parthenon did. The state capitol, raised between 1845 and 1859, is an Ionic temple with a lantern copied from an Athenian monument. When in 1897 a centrepiece was needed for the state's centennial exposition, the choice had effectively been made seventy years earlier.
02 It was built to last six months
The 1897 building, by the architect William Crawford Smith, was made of plaster, wood and brick. It was exposition architecture: cheap material, a convincing finish and a working life calculated to match the length of the event.
When the exposition ended, nobody pulled it down. The reason is documented and prosaic: demolition was expensive and the building was too popular. It stayed out of inertia and affection, two forces that preserve more heritage than is usually acknowledged.
The problem is that plaster outdoors does not survive twenty winters. Two decades later the building was falling apart.
03 The second one is concrete
The 1920 decision was to remake it on the same foundations, this time with permanent materials. The exterior was finished in 1925 and the interior in 1931. What you touch today is not stone: it is concrete worked to look like aged marble.
That detail changes the meaning of the visit. You are not looking at an archaeological copy made with the original's technique, but at a twentieth-century building using the technology of its own time to reproduce a fifth-century BCE one. It is an honest copy: it does not hide what it is made of.
It is worth looking up, between the columns. The coffers of the ceiling and the mouldings are cast, not carved, and up close you can see the joints of the formwork.
04 Inside there is a thirteen-metre Athena
The part almost nobody expects is inside. In 1990 the sculptor Alan LeQuire finished a reconstruction of the Athena Parthenos: 13 metres tall, holding a 1.80-metre figure of Victory in the palm of one hand.
For twelve years the statue was white. In 2002 it was gilded with more than three and a half kilos of gold leaf, which is what you see today and what brings it closer to what the original — made of gold and ivory — must have been.
The scale is hard to take in from a photograph. It fills the whole nave of the building, side to side and almost to the ceiling, which is precisely the effect the original arrangement was after.
05 What it reveals
The building works today as a municipal art museum. Its permanent collection is 63 American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, donated by a collector between 1927 and 1929, exactly while the interior was being finished.
It is a small fact that puts the rest in order: what was built was not a postcard but a cultural container, and as soon as it had a roof it started filling with art. The copy was the wrapping of an educational ambition dating back to 1824.
Once you know this, the building looks different. It stops being a photogenic eccentricity and becomes the visible residue of an idea a city had about itself two centuries ago, slipped first into a capitol, then into a fairground pavilion and finally into reinforced concrete.
