Acknowledgments

Lending, Mari

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Acknowledgments

Mari Lending

Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction

~~In 2009 I was invited to give a talk to an exclusive little group of Norwegian architects, Gamle arkitekters gruppe (Old Architects’ Group), the still-living masters of Norwegian modernism of Pritzker Prize laureate Sverre Fehn’s generation. Honored, I proposed the title “Svart gips” (”Black...

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Mari Lending

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22552

Acknowledgments

In 2009 I was invited to give a talk to an exclusive little group of Norwegian architects, Gamle arkitekters gruppe (Old Architects’ Group), the still-living masters of Norwegian modernism of Pritzker Prize laureate Sverre Fehn’s generation. Honored, I proposed the title “Svart gips” (”Black Plaster”) and was excited to present my early attempts to understand the scope of the casting of Norwegian stave church portals and their international dissemination in the last decades of the nineteenth century. During the presentation one of the architects expressed how shocked she was to learn that such a venerable institution as the V&A had generated the appalling idea of reproducing these beautiful wooden antiquities in plaster, before she literally collapsed and was carried out of the Norwegian Architectural Association’s board room and set down to recover on a sofa in an adjacent room. A week later I received a ten-page handwritten letter from a distinguished architect, professor emeritus as well as a former dean of the school of architecture in Oslo. He confided that he had hardly slept since the talk, envisioning that I might present students with this material and the associated ideas on history. It all appeared as a mockery of everything his generation of architects had endorsed: honesty, truthfulness, originality, authenticity. I was both moved and puzzled by the letter, and urged that it be published in the journal Arkitektur N, as I felt that it addressed profound ideological issues of public interest. That unfortunately did not happen. This reaction made me no less curious about why these architectural plaster casts have borne such disrepute in their afterlife and, more importantly, what they meant at the time of their making. I must confess that I have shared much of this material with students over the years. The stave church seminar I ran with a wonderful little group of students in 2012 is still one of my most cherished moments as a teacher.

The Oslo School of Architecture and Design has been a luxurious milieu in which to contemplate the plaster monuments. Two dear friends and colleagues have been key to the project. I had already begun to ponder an article on Proust and the Trocadéro (published first as “Spøkelsesmuseer”/“Ghost Museums”). I believe that the insight that this world of architectural reproductions might lead to something more can be dated to the time Mari Hvattum and I were drifting in Cervantes’s birth town, Alcalá de Henares in Spain, in October 2008. I had recently returned from a year in New York as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, working on scale models while growing increasingly attracted to these models at full scale. During these years Victor Plahte Tschudi and I paid several visits to Rome, discovering the similarities between his work on seventeenth-century engravings of antiquity and my molds and casts, and all the twisted temporalities that are harbored in these two media of reproduction. Having Mari and Victor around for both the everyday and the extraordinary means everything to me.

This book has benefited greatly from the two international research projects Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture and The Printed and the Built: Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe run out of OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies) and sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council, as well as the EU-funded project Printing the Past (PriArc), part of the HERA program “Uses of the Past,” graciously directed by Mari Hvattum. These initiatives have allowed us to bring favorite scholars to Oslo over and over, and have enabled me to present facets of the work, as it has developed over the years, to distinguished historians and exhibition scholars and specialists on nineteenth-century print culture. I have also benefited from lecturing on this material in Europe and the United States, making presentations at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as publishing bits and pieces along the way. Among those I am particularly indebted to, through discussions, commenting, reading, critique, encouragement, and exchange of material and ideas are: Tim Anstey, Thordis Arrhenius, Barry Bergdoll, Carson Chan, Beatriz Colomina, Adrian Forty, Karin Gundersen, Hilde Heinen, Lars Holen, Juliet Koss, Rolf Lending, Wallis Miller, Gro Bjørnerud Mo, Stanislaus von Moos, Sarah Mulrooney, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Timothy M. Rohan, Kari Rønneberg, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Erik Thorstensen, Panayotis Tournikiotis, and Peter Zumthor.

I have been assisted generously in archives as well as in storage spaces. A warm thanks to Ian Jenkins for an unforgettable tour of the British Museum’s casts at Blythe House in 2014, and to Niall Hobhouse for arranging that. Tracy Myers and Alyssum Skjeie have been incredibly helpful at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and a warm thanks to Franklin Toker as well. Barbara File helped me in the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives, and Élisabeth le Breton at the Louvre Museum has generously helped me with rare images from the Louvre collection. A special thanks to Christiane Pinatel for letting me use her splendid photograph on the book cover. The hospitality of Robert Stern and Richard DeFlumeri, when I was a visiting scholar at Yale School of Architecture in 2014 and beyond, has been invaluable, and no less important were my discussions with Brenda Danilowitz at the Josef and Anni Albers foundation. Thanks to Robert Shure, a living formatore and restorer who stands in an unbroken chain with the skilled artisans who crafted the nineteenth-century plaster monuments, whom I can also thank for the company of Ashurnasirpal II, hunting a lion from his chariot, in my Oslo apartment. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, Holly (Marjorie) Trusted helped me track down the origins of the circulating stave church portals, while Paul Williamson guided me through broken casts backstage at South Kensington. More stave church mysteries were solved with the kindest help of Jan Zahle and Henrik Holm at the Royal Cast Collection/National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Sonja Innselset at the University Museum of Bergen. Our librarians at the school in Oslo are world-class. The anonymous readers for Princeton University Press gave invaluable suggestions to improve the manuscript, and I wish I could thank them in person. I appreciate the beautiful work of Luke Bulman and Camille Sacha Salvador, the book’s designers, and of Steven Sears, who handled its production. I am forever grateful to my editor Michelle Komie for firmly believing in all this weirdness and to Lauren Lepow, who has been as much a soul mate as a copyeditor.

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