Plaster Monuments

We are taught to believe in originals. In art and architecture in particular, original objects vouch for authenticity, value, and truth, and require our protection and preservation. The nineteenth century, however, saw this issue differently. In a culture of reproduction, plaster casts of building fragments and architectural features were sold throughout Europe and America and proudly displayed in leading museums. The first comprehensive history of these full-scale replicas, Plaster Monuments examines how they were produced, marketed, sold, and displayed, and how their significance can be understood today. Plaster Monuments unsettles conventional thinking about copies and originals. As Mari Lending shows, the casts were used to restore wholeness to buildings that in reality lay in ruin, or to isolate specific features of monuments to illustrate what was typical of a particular building, style, or era. Arranged in galleries and published in exhibition catalogues, these often enormous objects were staged to suggest the sweep of history, synthesizing structures from vastly different regions and time periods into coherent narratives.While architectural plaster casts fell out of fashion after World War I, Lending brings the story into the twentieth century, showing how Paul Rudolph incorporated historical casts into the design for the Yale Art and Architecture building, completed in 1963. Drawing from a broad archive of models, exhibitions, catalogues, and writings from architects, explorers, archaeologists, curators, novelists, and artists, Plaster Monuments tells the fascinating story of a premodernist aesthetic and presents a new way of thinking about history's artifacts.

"Shortlisted for the 2018 DAM Architectural Book Award, Deutsches Architekturmuseum", "An excellent book . . . about the desire on the part of nineteenth-century museums to collect reproductions at least as much as originals in order to demonstrate the history of art in as systematic and comprehensive way as possible [and] illustrated with wonderful images of cast collections."---Charles Saumarez Smith, "It is timely amid new contexts for preservation and when reproduction technologies are advancing, that Lending’s analysis reveals the significance of their plaster precursors."---Olivia Horsfall Turner, Apollo, "This is a marvellous book, an original contribution to our understanding of how plaster casts of sculpture and architectural elements were manufactured and displayed in museums throughout Europe and America, which makes important points concerning their cultural, political, educational and philosophical significance."---James Stevens Curl, Times Higher Education, "As Lending argues, the plaster monument was a part of the separation of originals and copies in the nineteenth century, a topic that continues into the twenty-first century. . . . Despite new media, technical methods and intellectual frameworks, the cast monument remains a key part of our cultural context and our interaction with the past."---Matthew Wells, Burlington Magazine

Mari Lending is professor of architectural history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Her books include, with Mari Hvattum, Modelling Time and, with Peter Zumthor, A Feeling for History.