For nearly a millennium, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, with its columns, colonnades, and gleaming pyramid for a crown, overlooked the capital of the province of Caria in Asia Minor, before a series of earthquakes in the 13th century leveled the monument. In the first century, Roman historian Pliny the Elder commemorated the architects responsible for building it, Pythios and Satyros, as well as the artists who decorated it, calling the building a “memorial of their own fame and of the sculptor’s art.” From Pliny’s Natural History (77–79 CE), we can get an exact sense of the dimensions of the building: He records the interior as having a 440-foot perimeter and a height of 140 feet (in Roman measurements). More than two millennia later, the steel magnate and robber baron Andrew Carnegie would fancy himself a Gilded Age King Mausolus — those measurements became the basis of the Pittsburgh firm Longfellow, Alden, & Harlow’s gargantuan Hall of Architecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Since it opened in 1907, the Carnegie’s Hall of Architecture has been virtually unchanged: It is a cavernous space decorated with massive plaster casts of sculptural and architectural treasures of the Mediterranean, Western Asia, and Western Europe. Even while Carnegie’s original vision of his museum has been greatly expanded over the past century, particularly with the 1974 opening of the Scaife Galleries in a Modernist addition to the Beaux Arts structure, the Hall of Architecture has endured as a fascinating, beautiful, and under-praised aspect of that complex.
In an era before transatlantic flight, Carnegie’s vision for his institution was in keeping with a popular trend throughout Western museums wherein elaborate and often gigantic plaster casts of famed architectural features and sculptures from around the world would be displayed to audiences. As art historian Mari Lending explains in Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (2017), such collections were mainstays of every major museum in the 19th century — intricate casts of sculptural and architectural masterpieces could even be purchased by curators through catalogs. “The cast business was orchestrated by prominent museum directors, archeologists, architects, art and architecture historians, and antiquarians,” Lending writes, with the idea being that these spaces provided visitors with as close to a “real” experience as possible. She adds that in 1853, the British Museum antiquarian William Richard Hamilton would even opine, somewhat cryptically, that “casts are preferable to originals, because they cast a purer and more original shadow.” At the Carnegie Museum of Art, then, a steel worker from Hazelwood could stand before the Venus de Milo, a glass blower from Greenfield the Victory of Samothrace, a coal miner from Tarentum the Florentine Baptistery Doors of Ghiberti.
Lending provides a litany of examples that nod to the sheer bounty of (imitation) wealth in the Hall of Architecture, including “Egyptian capitals, Assyrian pavements, Phoenician reliefs, Greek temple porches, Hellenistic columns, Etruscan urns, Roman entablatures, Gothic portals, Renaissance balconies, niches and choir stalls; parapets and balustrades, sarcophagi, pulpits, and ornamental details.” At one point, such a collection, assembled beneath a skylight in a hall the size of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus with smaller pieces arranged around the perimeter, would have been de rigueur at any major museum.
Yet in the first decades of the 20th century, such collections began to be interpreted as an “intellectual and artistic embarrassment,” Landing writes. In the next few decades, they were “subjected to neglect, denial, and violent destruction.” By the 1950s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had removed all of its casts. As Jane Margolies explains in a 2016 New York Times article, they “ended up stored under the West Side Highway in Upper Manhattan, where the drip-drip-drip from a leaky roof and vibrations from traffic took their toll,” before being moved to a Bronx warehouse. The Art Institute of Chicago had eliminated its collection of casts by 1952, seeing it both as an archaic holdover from the institutional past and more pragmatically, a fire hazard. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts eliminated its collection even earlier, having sold or destroyed most of those objects in the 1920s.
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element,” writes the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in his seminal 1936 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Art historians and museum administrators’ aversion to inauthenticity — their belief in the idea of an “aura,” as Benjamin might say — was arguably a motivating factor in the elimination of such collections.
And yet this new familiar model does a disservice to the craftsmanship and ingenuity of producing and assembling these casts — the workers who approached the marble works at the Uffizi and the Prado, the limestone walls of Chartres and Notre Dame, with an alchemy of wet molds and plaster of Paris, and duplicated masterpieces. At the Carnegie, a marvelous centerpiece of that lost craft is the 87-foot facade of the 12th-century Romanesque Abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, reproduced by a team of European molders and shipped across the Atlantic in 200 separate containers in four steamers to New York, then sent by rail to Pittsburgh, where it was reassembled along the back wall of the Hall of Architecture. The largest cast in history, it was purchased by Carnegie, Lending writes, in partial contravention of a French law that limited the casting of originals in the country.
In the resulting sculpture, no detail is obscured, no feature ignored — the effect is of being transported to southern France. These faux artifacts induce a feeling of not only spatial sublimity due to their towering sizes, but also a temporal and historical sublimity in their invocation of a yawning expanse of history, Benjamin’s argument notwithstanding. The only place to stand before the abbey church of Saint-Giles-du-Gard is either at the original, or in front of its expert simulation in Pittsburgh. In his In Search of Lost Time (1913), Marcel Proust would even goes so far as to commend the eternal perfection of a plaster cast of a church, while suggesting that the original had been “reduced to nothing but its own shape in stone.”
Reticence about the practice was already common when Carnegie began amassing his own artifacts, with Lending remarking that this “world-class architecture collection [was] installed in his hometown at the very moment when these displays were falling out of vogue.” Whether because Carnegie cared less about art than he did the natural history collection he was assembling next door, or because of innate curatorial conservatism, the Hall of Architecture survived unscathed while museums from New York to San Francisco, London to St. Petersburg, destroyed theirs in acts of unpublicized iconoclasm. As a result, the Carnegie collection is today the third largest in the world, rivaled only by those of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and by far the largest such collection in the Americas.
Never a particularly notable institution for ancient, Medieval, or Renaissance art, the Carnegie nonetheless made up for such deficits with cunning simulacra. Even while it developed a reputation for Modernism — bolstered in particular by its periodic international exhibition, arguably the oldest recurring event of its type since it began in 1896 — the Hall of Architecture has quietly endured out of the spotlight as a space for concerts and wedding receptions, fundraisers and art classes. Generations of Pittsburghers made a tradition of viewing the museum’s annual Christmas tree display in that appropriately impressive space, alongside the 18th-century Neapolitan presepio Nativity scene, among the most complete of its type in a public collection.
Yet now, as in a century ago, these casts seem to be increasingly obscured from view: Over the past few years, the presepio has been demoted from its traditional place in the Hall of Architecture to hard-to-find rooms of the Scaife Galleries, and often include fewer figures. This is in keeping with a regrettable trend at the museum of seemingly minimizing their collections from earlier centuries: Many Medieval and Renaissance pieces have apparently been moved into storage, with the second room of the Scaife Galleries being turned into a confusing exhibition introducing the collection entitled “What Brings Us Here?”
Even while classicist Mary Beard would opine in the Times Literary Supplement that the Hall of Architecture comprised “one of the most stunning groups of plaster casts anywhere in the world,” it can appear as if the Carnegie doesn’t totally acknowledge the treasure that is the hall (though in fairness, there have been retrospectives about it in the past). Far from being antiquated and fussy, the Hall of Architecture provides a model for museums in the contemporary moment, during a reckoning about how artifacts were acquired. Even accounting for Carnegie’s own (ample) ethical lapses, nothing in the Hall of Architecture can be said to have been unceremoniously filched from its rightful owner. You can view the Elgin Marbles in Pittsburgh and in London, but the former isn’t perpetuating an act of imperial plunder against the people of Athens. The same is true with the Hall of Architecture’s Monument of Lysicrates or the Lion Gate of Mycenae, the caryatides of the Erechtheion or the Sienese Cathedral pulpit. Viewed in this way, the Hall of Architecture could be seen as a vanguard, a forerunner of future exhibitions around the world displaying 3D-printed replicas while originals are returned to their country of origin.
Ethics is one thing, but aesthetics is another, and from that latter perspective, it’s my contention that the Hall of Architecture, in all its archaic and bizarre glory, is a beautiful triumph. The effect of entering this massive space — populated with an assortment of what appears to be some of the most famous objects ever carved by human hand — is breathtaking. That’s because the curatorial work of assembling the hall more than a century ago must be understood as an artistic work in its own right. This isn’t merely a hodgepodge of knockoffs, but rather a painstakingly assembled bricolage, a kind of architectural mixtape rendered in three dimensions. As Lending puts it, “We find ourselves in a hypnotic space fabricated from reproduced building parts from widely various times and places.” With some opprobrium, she describes the pieces as “decontextualized, dismembered,” as well as “mute and ghostlike… programmed to evoke the experience of the real thing.” Yet even the art historian’s criticism of this or that wall text, or the verisimilitude of certain reproductions, can’t minimize her sense of the overall affect of the space, where “strange constellations and bewildering juxtapositions cause time and space to bend and fold inside the four walls of the Hall of Architecture,” a place where the “dizzying sensation of time travel was inescapable.”
Because that’s what the Hall of Architecture offers: a singular aesthetic experience of art history as a kind of monad, the exhibition itself as a portal or vortex through generations, an imagined and fantastic space that’s both beyond time and outside of space, a glimpse of eternity itself. Toward the end of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic Basquiat, Andy Warhol, as played perfectly by David Bowie, remembers the museum where he took art classes in his youth, surrounded by the treasures of the Old World left behind by his immigrant parents. “We could go to Pittsburgh!” he says. “They have this room with all of the world’s famous statues in it, so you don’t even go to Europe anymore … just go to Pittsburgh.” It’s a room that somehow contains a whole world.
