The museum was built to house every artifact found on the rock and on the surrounding slopes, from the Greek Bronze Age to Roman and Byzantine Greece.

[3] Creation of a gallery for the display of the Parthenon Marbles has been key to all recent proposals for the design of a new museum.

Both the 1976 competition and one that followed it in 1979 failed to produce any results mainly because the plots of land selected for the proposed constructions were deemed unsuitable.

After delays throughout the 1990s, work on the construction of the museum based on this third design progressed to the stage of excavations for the foundations, but these were stopped due to apparently sensitive archaeological remains on the site, leading to annulment of the competition in 1999.

In retrospect, the location of the new museum was rather straightforward: the large lot of the unused "Camp Makrygianni" gendarmerie barracks, opposite the Theater of Dionysus.

The barracks were built on public land and a limited number of expropriations of surrounding private houses were needed to free up the necessary space.

These were met to a degree only after local and international (ICOMOS) campaigners exposed this oversight and it became the final competition.

These traverse the soil to the underlying bedrock and float on roller bearings able to withstand a Richter scale magnitude 10 earthquake.

[4][5] The museum is located by the southeastern slope of the Acropolis hill, on the ancient road that led up to the "sacred rock" in classical times.

On the same floor, there are artifacts and sculptures from the other Acropolis buildings such as the Erechtheum, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaea and findings from Roman and early Christian Athens.

Bernard Tschumi has been showing photographic images of the space in front of the museum edited to remove the two buildings and nearby four-story-tall trees.