Promenade Among Words and Things: The Gallery as Catalogue, the Catalogue as Gallery. Issue 1 (24th December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lending, Mari
• Is Part Of: Architectural histories. Volume 3:Issue 1(2015)
• Publication Date: 2015-12-24
• Subjects: Architecture -- History -- Periodicals; Architecture -- Historiography -- Periodicals; Architecture -- Research -- Periodicals; 720.9
• DOI: 10.5334/ah.da
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-5833

Abstract

Abstract : In the mid-19th century new casting techniques allowed for the production of huge building fragments. Well-selected cast collections would ideally display perfect series in galleries in which the visitor could wander among monuments and experience the history of architecture on a full scale and in three dimensions. The disembodied material of plaster proved capable of embodying a number of modern historical taxonomies and aesthetical programs, most importantly chronology, comparison, style, and evolution. Veritable showcases of historicism, the casts could illustrate in spatial arrangements new conceptions on the history, contemporaneity and future of architecture. The plaster cast became a main medium in which to publish antiquities as novelties for grand audiences, taking the printed and the published beyond the two-dimensional space of words and images. However, due to the increasing market of casts and their sheer size and weight, the reproductions as mounted in the galleries often behaved as disorderly as architecture does outside curatorial control. In the end only the catalogues, the paper versions of these imaginary museums, could create the order their plaster referents constantly aspired to destroy. An important chapter in the history of the architecture museum, these plaster monuments belong to a part of architectural print culture in which catalogues were curated and galleries edited. Metaphors drawn from the realm of writing saturated the discourse on the display of casts. Images and texts fluctuated and the image-objects were compared to books, paper, pages, documents and libraries but above all to illustrations inviting promenades in time and space.