Old Masters in Plaster

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.

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.