The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago, advocated the City Beautiful movement by its own architectural example. But besides the classicized façades of the White City, the exhibition got down to detail in the Palace of Fine Arts, where cast-plaster fragments of classical and historical buildings were displayed along with cast-plaster statues after the antique. The event inspired American institutions, including the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, to create their own cast-plaster architecture exhibitions, which looked like Renaissance vedute, those imaginary urban visions of buildings gathered like neighbors into the same collapsed view.
But by the 1920s, plaster cast collections fell out of fashion, discredited by new museological assumptions favoring originals rather than copies. Not long after, Modernism inflicted the coup de grâce. The collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Art Institute of Chicago, among others, were dispersed, and their very existence passed out of collective awareness. A very few still exist, and the Carnegie Museum, with its 140 plaster architectural casts still standing in their original position in the Beaux-Arts Hall of Architecture, has the largest in the Western hemisphere and one of the three largest in the world.
The Carnegie's plaster-cast collection is now the subject of a show—“On a Grand Scale: The Hall of Architecture at 100”—in the Heinz Architectural Center within the museum. The show, which closes Jan. 27, 2008, is really an exhibition squared, an exhibition about an exhibition. It takes us back into time twice, to the mindset of a hundred years ago when the collection was formed, and to each chapter in a condensed architectural history representing stone architecture in plaster. The curator, Mattie Schloetzer, has included contemporary plaster sculpture by British artist Rachel Whiteread to demonstrate the tradition of plaster casting transformed into a contemporary vision.
Receding façades: In the Carnegie's Hall of Architecture, a model of the Parthenon sits in front of a plaster cast of the Porch of the Caryatids from the Erechtheum, a temple on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
Credit: Richard Barnes
Along with a sister Hall of Sculpture, the Hall of Architecture was a gift of Andrew Carnegie. The philanthropist believed in educating the public, and plaster casts were the museum equivalent of mass-printed books for the community lending libraries he also endowed. He was not interested in first editions, or costly original Greek and Roman sculpture, but in the ideas that copies delivered. He was educating the public rather than appealing to connoisseurs, promoting the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance through self-education. “The few who travel much fail to remember that the masses of people travel but little,” he said. In short, Carnegie was bringing the Grand Tour to Pittsburgh.
Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” So when we enter the cavernous Hall of Architecture within the larger Carnegie Museum, we are twice edified. The hall contains large-scale fragments of such masterworks as the Porch of the Caryatids from the Erechtheum on the Acropolis and a 12th century Romanesque portal from the abbey church of St. Gilles, in Gard, France (now the largest cast in the world). Smaller pieces include Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, from the Duomo in Florence, and the Renaissance pulpits of Santa Croce in Florence and the cathedral at Siena. All are arrayed in a peristyle hall modeled after one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum at Halicarnassus in what is now Turkey. A column and capital fragment of the mausoleum is displayed within the descendant building, which was designed in 1907 by Pittsburgh architects Frank Alden and Alfred Harlow, updated via a Beaux-Arts interpretation.
Alden and Harlow miss no opportunity to instruct visitors, both in the architecture of the surrounding museum and in the hall itself. The architects planned the visit to the hall as a processional: Visitors ascend a broad flight of stairs, as though rising into a temple. The exhibition offers experience, and the experience is elevating. You rise to the occasion. Extrapolating from the nature of the exhibits, Alden and Harlow classicized even the museum's bronze elevator cabs, down to the crown moldings of acanthus leaves.
The cast architectural fragments here come from edifices pregnant with meanings, many of them quasi-moral or overtly religious. The Carnegie's copy of the Temple of Athena Nike from the Acropolis harbors the mysteries of geometric harmony, and a portal from the Cathedral of Saint Andre in Bordeaux visualizes figures from the Bible. Visitors can admire the copy of the Lion's Gate at Mycenae, a major monument of architectural history, and the palm-leaf capital from the Egyptian temple of Heracleopolis, 1330 B.C., inscribed with the name Ramses II.
Carefully curated at the time for excellence and representative breadth, the buildings embodied the didactic capacity of architecture to teach the lessons of high culture. The educational mission served not only the general public, but also schoolchildren, architects, and tradesmen and artists who learned to draw by sketching the pieces.
For its time, the hall was huge, housing replicas of building exteriors as well as interiors. The visitor has the strange sensation of being simultaneously inside and outside. Now, the plaster casts are themselves antique.
“On a grand scale” establishes the context of the time. One wall of architectural prints from the 19th century, with idealized and sentimentalized views of monuments like the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, demonstrates the popularity and accessibility of architectural representation for people who wanted souvenirs of their trips, and for those who couldn't make the trips but hung the images on their walls. There are Baedekers on display, illustrated even for travelers who never made it beyond the armchair.
On another wall are views of the numerous plaster-cast museums of the time, including the Columbian exhibition itself. The museums were really casting ideals in plaster, because these buildings embodied character and virtue. They taught by their example of principle. In the late 19th century, there was an international network of like-minded museums that shared the idea of bringing classics to the masses. The column fragment from the Halicarnassus mausoleum was cast from the original in the British Museum. Period photos capture showrooms stocked with plaster casts, gallery-style. Art became an industrialized, widely accessible commodity charged with a moralistic social agenda. The Winged Victory could be ordered from a catalog for middle-class houses.
Flanking the entrance to the Hall of Architecture (above left) are Sophocles (at left) and Hermes with the infant Dionysus.
Credit: Richard Barnes
One of the exhibits simply explains the mechanics of casting, showing how piece molds were taken off original stonework and then puzzled together for the final pour. The deeply carved hollows in the original required deft handicraft and numerous fitted pieces to register the sculptural undercutting. (Today, casts are made with rubber and silicon, which can simply be peeled off the master.) Architectural drawings illustrate just how these edifices of plaster imitating stone were erected on scaffolds of wood. One exhibit shows how plaster casts are restored: Many casts relegated to basements and orphaned to other museums did not fare well, and the survivors often need work.
A photograph, once owned by H.H. Richardson, of St. Gilles church shows its probable influence on his design of the heavily Romanesque Trinity Church in Boston. These copies acted as architectural models, and Carnegie's encyclopedic hall served as a reference for professionals. With the availability of prints, the new medium of architectural photography, and plaster architectural casts, late 19th century architects had the information that facilitated their eclecticism, born of the century's fascination with history.
What plaster casts added to this base of information and inspiration was three-dimensionality. Representations of buildings on paper tend to flatten space, even when drawn in perspective, whereas the casts accurately simulated the spatial depth of the originals. In the last several decades, the impact of drawing and art on architecture has been huge—as in the work of Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry—and these casts exercised a comparable influence through drawing: Six sketchbooks displayed in the exhibition are turned to pages drawn from cast plaster models. For the avant-garde of the time, casts were a tool akin to computer modeling today.
Cumulatively, the exhibits establish that plaster casts represented a world unto itself that posited a utopia of the past. Today, however, it is difficult for modernist eyes to perceive the importance that casts played as an instrument of public and professional education and inspiration. Used to seeing objects only as objects, we overlook the meanings that these, so freighted with notions of culture, represent.
But like the famous “The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts” drawing show held at MoMA in 1975, with the magisterial watercolor renderings done in the 19th century through World War I, this is a show that remembers a potent and original way of delivering the idea of architecture. The show is also fresh for returning to a page of museological and pedagogical history that has been decisively turned. With incremental exhibits that build on each other, explaining the phenomenon slowly and even obliquely, the show itself is subtle and quiet. Rather than recapitulating the grand architectural spectacle standing nearby, it opens the subject. It clarifies the rudiments of how casts were physically made, mounted, and repaired, and it intimates the why of plaster casts by contextualizing them in the zeitgeist.
The shadowy and delicate Romantic aura of some of the drawings and etchings on view implies that the casts were not so much physical as oneiric cues, touchstones to dreaming about other places and times via the magic carpet of buildings. To be sure, the casts were a form of documentary, but they impressed and elicited strong reactions and emotions, much like the huge tableaux of the Rockies and Yosemite brought to East Coast audiences by painter Albert Bierstadt. The casts awed by their precision and presence.
Curiously, the hall itself, and therefore the exhibition, presages issues that Walter Benjamin raises in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which questions the merits of the original over the copy. One photograph on display shows very proper turn-of-the-last-century female students, hair up and in braids, drawing from a plaster nude cast from a Roman statue, probably copied from a Greek original. Somehow it was acceptable for Victorian women to draw the male form in translations once or twice removed from the original. Reproductions sanitized the event by keeping the original at a distance. Meant for the mind, they transmitted an ideal removed from the physical. The architectural casts, in fact, were buildings without space: Visitors could see but never enter. They remain tantalizing façades.
This show may appear to address a dry subject. But in fact it's very daring and conceptually layered, provocative and unexpected. It displaces our prejudices so that we can see with more understanding eyes how an important didactic tool both instilled architecture as a collective myth and taught the lay public and the profession. The exhibition is not revisionist in the sense of casting a new and different interpretation on a phenomenon with an accepted meaning. The Carnegie has simply dusted off an apparently musty subject, mounting a historiographic exhibition about a rich but forgotten moment in architecture.
Joseph Giovannini is a New York–based architect and critic.