Summary
Really though, I think that it's the present that remains largely the same. If the military quagmire overseas doesn't convince you, then maybe the upcoming beleaguered Clinton presidency and blockbuster Led Zeppelin tour will. The present is just like it always was. It's the past that keeps changing.
In 1907, when the Hall opened, having a grand exhibition room filled with replica fragments of the Western world's great architecture was the way to learn about the beautiful necessities of the art. Architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, at the height of its influence in the United States, used plaster casts (and actual fragments) as learning tools. Chicago's epoch-making Columbian Exposition of 1893 displayed a huge collection of casts (in a neoclassical building that was itself sheathed in plaster). Museums around the world, not least the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, collected and displayed architecture in this manner.On a Grand Scale, assembled by curator Mattie Schloetzer, reveals the delicate and complex process of casting through correspondence, photographs and a few surviving molds. This exhibit's exploration of how casts were selected for and used in schools, museums and publications gives a nuanced portrait of one era's priorities for material, craft and detail in communicating architectural values. That later generations dismissed these artifacts as "merely copies" seems especially wrongheaded in retrospect.See the full content of this document
Extract
A Good Impression of Architecture
THE LEAST COMPELLING part of studying history is dressing up in a bonnet and wishing that you were back in historic, 18th-century Quaintsville. To the dull, the past is a repository of steady conditions and values that helps an...
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