 Okay, good afternoon everyone. So if people sit down, we're going to start the final session. I'm Andrew Dolecart. I'm a professor here of Historic Preservation. For those of you who don't know me, just a few housekeeping things. If you look carefully at your program, you'll discover that it's wrong. That this session is not an hour, it's a typo. So we're going to, we're going to, each session is two hours. So we're going to go to about 5.45 so that everybody gets their say and hopefully we'll have a lively conversation afterwards. And then just to let everybody know that there will be cocktails outside after. That's not outdoors, but out by the cafe. So when it's over, there'll be more time to socialize and discuss what we've done today. I'm going to be very brief because I think the program is really terrific and it has everybody's biography and it has a synopsis of everybody's talk. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that because we want to have as much time as possible with the speakers. So our first speaker, we're moving from urban to political to archival moves and this is really, I think it's going to be really interesting because I've read the synopses and I know some of the people and the moves part is going to be a real curiosity to me and how this deals with these issues of moving. So our first speaker whom I'm thrilled to introduce is Janet Parks, whom I've known for most of our, both she and I have known each other for most of our careers. She was the curator of drawings and archives here at Columbia until she retired in the spring and she's going to talk, her talk is entitled, Architectural Archives, A Variable Beast. So, Janet. Thank you very much. Good. It came up. I want to thank Jorge for inviting me to speak here at the 2017 Fitch Colloquium. Conceptually, buildings can be viewed if their documents have been archived and achieving a permanence as Talbot Hamlin, the Avery Librarian once described. They achieve a permanence in the archive that they often do not achieve in reality. So my talk is going to focus on architectural records, mostly drawn from my particular experience here at Avery. Architectural records are collections that can also be subject to destruction, either from indifference, lack of resources, actual attack, or natural disaster. So, okay. This is just to give you an idea. If you can read this sign, it says Top Self Storage up there at the top. What does it mean to select, acquire, and transport architectural archives? Issues of size, condition, and variety of media and formats are common. Archives are moved around where they end up may not be convenient to moving supplies, movers, and other logistical necessities. Donors often have little experience in describing and estimating contents, especially materials that need special care. And I tried often to get a bit general idea from donors by asking them to describe it, and the results were often like the story of the three blind men describing an elephant, each one touching a different part, the trunk, the leg, or the tail. When donors are ready to let go of the materials, the collection may have been moved multiple times, each time repacked, possibly reordered, and sometimes partly discarded. So, where have I been to collect archives? Obviously, here. Somewhere west of Hudson. There. I'm still not quite sure where that is. And then, here I am. Whoops. Let's see if I... Oh, sorry. Wrong button. So, this is the fantasy versus reality. The fantasy being that it's going to be like some kind of beautiful Dutch interior. And the reality is what you get over on the right. And not all of that is the archive I spent. Two days here in upstate New York in those spaces outside, wearing at least four layers of clothing. And, thankfully, there was an empty storage unit where I could set up shop on the two rainy days I spent there. Getting all the packing materials in myself to this location was difficult. And, fortunately, FedEx does schedule pickups in this area. But I actually didn't have cell phone service. So, okay. I first visited Max Abramowitz in the 1980s when his firm was still in Rockefeller Center and was shown incredible conceptual sketches for Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. He decided to retire from active practice at age 89 in 1997. By then, his offices had moved to the top floor of the New York Life Building, as seen there on the right. I helped him go through his office to retrieve stray items, but the conceptual drawings I saw were no longer part of the archive. The bulk of their archive was in the storage space under the golden tower of the building, housed in filing cabinets and tubes and accessible only by climbing several flights of wide concrete stairs. A rigging company had to be hired to retrieve these materials and then deliver them to Avery. The drawings of Horace Ginsburg, an apartment house architect best known for his buildings on the Grand Concourse and for being one of Andrew's favorite apartment architects, these were located in the basement of this apartment building also by his design. Management, one of these drawings removed from a basement storage space. Two graduate assistants and I went through all the drawings, leaving behind materials that did not have enough information for research, blank sheets, very preliminary layouts with no project name, etc. Finally, the most challenging of all, the move of the Frank Lloyd Wright archive from Scottsdale, Arizona to Avery. There were three moves in all from 2013 to 2016, each packing trip lasting two weeks, yielding a total of six tractor trailer loads of drawings, photographs, correspondence, papers and many other types of materials. These images show the first move of the core Frank Lloyd Wright archive, the material he created during his lifetime. Slat crates for drawings, a very large flat crate for the very oversized drawings. This one right here, this is about 115 inches long, the crate. Then at top, all of the boxes were in these carts that we had specifically dimensioned for these materials. Then the slat crates for the drawings, which are right here and more of the carts. Carts for packing box materials, the totals were staggering, and this, as I say, was one of three moves. More crates getting ready to be loaded, and then here loading the 18 wheelers with the forklifts on the left-hand side and then on the right-hand side they're adjusting and strapping in all the crates into the truck itself. And then that's one of them taking off for New York. If a donor has preserved material, the collection has great meaning to them. For architect donors, there is a wide range of attitudes. Money can be an issue out of necessity. They may want to place their work in different repositories with different affiliations or prestige. Surviving firm partners can be at odds with the family, or the family can be at odds with each other. The lack of a tax benefit for self-created work is also a disincentive for donation. Finally, the attachment to the archive may be very positive, a source of pride or great attachment, or it can be negative, a father who was too busy for his family during his career. The donor may or may not know much about the material, or they may be an expert. The donor may be grappling with estate questions or dealing with their own grief. Older donors may sadly be affected by significant illness themselves. One of the most operatic and real scenarios is that of the Louise Baragon archive, which was, after Baragon's death, first in possession of his architectural partner, who then died, then the partner's widow, who then sold it to Rolf Veilbaum, the president of Vitra, who bought the archive supposedly as an engagement present for his wife, an architectural historian. The archive, now in Switzerland, has virtually and actually disappeared from public access. Indeed, the Baragon archive website asserts that the copyright of his work, which came with the archive, extends to any image of the buildings as the buildings themselves are copyrighted works. In response to this closure, a conceptual artist wooed some members of the Baragon family and received permission to exhume the body to extract a sample of his remains, which were then compressed into a new diamond ring. Other family members were understandably revolted when they heard what had happened. The artist hoped that the ring would be accepted by the owners of the archive in exchange for the archive's return to Mexico. This is the truth. It's a short version. Ashes equals archives in this particular case. By contrast, what happened to Philip Johnson's remaining architectural archive seems totally normal. It was awarded to an architect from the office a settlement for breach of contract lawsuit over not being made partner when Johnson dissolved his practice. The American novelist Henry James based his novella, The Aspirin Papers, on an actual situation concerning love letters held by the last mistress of the English poet Lord Byron, and the lengths collectors went to to try to obtain them. In his novella, that included the wooing of the mistress's spinster niece and caretaker. The real life family were considered, quote, illiberal and dangerous guardians, unquote, of the letters, which were discreditable to the poet in their eyes. Once told that it was their duty, especially to the English public, to show them, the reaction from the family dowager was as suffiche pure of the English public and told him one of the letters had been burned. This resonated with James, who himself burned all correspondence in his possession. In last week's New York Times, the novelist Amy Tan said she would destroy all her private papers. Reinforcing again this ultimate fact. It is the donor's private property until it is not, either through donation or sale. All right, so this is indeed fire, either accidental or intentional, is one of the greatest threats to the paper files of an architect. The records of Frank Lloyd Wright's early career were significantly reduced by multiple fires at Talley as an East. More recently, the archive of James Stewart Polshek was largely destroyed by a fire at the warehouse where the collection had been moved. The bulk of Max Bond's early work was destroyed when fire swept his office on Broadway. In the 1950s madmen era, when smoking was considered part of the work ambience, several firms suffered significant fires. I am told this was the case with John Johansson's firm and that many of the drawings of the 1950s modernist houses were destroyed. What remains in Avery's Johansson collection are negative photo stats of the drawings, but they are not original drawings. And you see on the screen here photographs from Avery's collection, Harrison and Abramovich's collection of the fire that took place in their office in Rockefeller Center also in the 1950s. At the top left is the office just as it normally was and then the bottom two are the office after the fire. And this too destroyed many drawings of their early works. And one last example, there is the point where Arson and politics overlap. That appears to be the case with the fire on April 21st, 2017 of the Archives of the Institute for Town Planning and Architecture in Skopje, Macedonia, which held the work by Kenzo Tange, Arato Isozaki, and others who rebuilt Skopje after the devastating earthquake of 1963 that destroyed 75% to 80% of the city. There are efforts to see what can be salvaged and there is material and other archives, notably at Harvard, who hold archives by the architects involved. In this case, quoting an article by surgeon Jovanovic Weiss in the Architects newspaper, quote, the center of the dispute is the claim that Alexander the Great is allegedly from Macedonia. According to Skopje 2014, which is kind of a master plan report, Macedonia must assert its, quote, true national identity by building fake classical architecture. We predicted, quote, that Skopje will disappear, unquote, because of this bold nationalist pseudo classical proposal to hide anything Tange did, unquote. The devaluation of the 1963 buildings contributed to an atmosphere where the archive was vulnerable. And of course, good old fashioned real estate greed may have also played a role here. It is hard to transition from the ruthlessness embodied in these images. They do speak to the power of architecture. But archives have disappeared too for a lack of interest or opportunity. Morris Lapidus, tired of criticism of his work, burned his archive. George Mayer, the successful Oak Park architect contemporary to Frank Lloyd Wright, also destroyed his archive according to his son, because at that time they didn't know what to do with it. Clearly that has been the fate of many drawings, especially from the 19th century. Few records remain, but there were many practices producing work. Knowing the history of an archives' peregrinations can be instructive and revealing, not only in the acquisition and evaluation of the material, but in their use by researchers. The Thomas Lamb collection of theater architecture, which we accessioned in 1982, was held by John McNamara, Lamb's successor for over 40 years. And so I just have a couple of images here that you'll be familiar with. The one on the top left is the theater in Flushing Queens that the owner managed to rip apart before landmarks stepped in and got him to stop. And then the newly designated United Palace Theater at 175th and Broadway. And then the color postcard interior is the Ohio Theater in Columbus, Ohio, which is my hometown. In my high school choir we were supposedly the last people to sing in that auditorium, but then local groups got together in the late 60s and actually stopped the demolition of the theater. And then now it is a focal point of downtown, whoops, focal point of downtown culture. So John McNamara still had these drawings and he had used them for theater and stage renovations and alterations. At the time I met him he was modifying the Winter Garden stage for a new musical called Cats, which closed in 2000 as the fourth longest running show in Broadway history. McNamara had no successor for his firm. The drawings were housed in a fifth floor dressing room, no elevator, in the Lyric Theater on 42nd Street. So those little windows up there, that's about where the drawings were. There had been interest in the collection. Its existence was known, but its size of 20,000 plus drawings was difficult for museums. The donor wanted to keep the collection together. With Rambush trucks made available to Avery through Cava Rambush's help, we had a fire brigade of staff including our graduate assistant Barry Bergdahl to bring the materials to the street. When we brought the collection into our storage space, the tubes covered an area of about 300 square feet stacked about three feet high. One of the most popular collections that we've ever had, these theaters are often sort of the centerpiece of the renewal of an older urban downtown space. Sometimes individual items show up in unexpected places. The Thomas Lamb collection revealed several real surprises, including drawings for a diorama of a Panama Canal, set up in Stanford White's Madison Square Garden as a display to be used for fundraising to build the canal. So we had locks and water going through the arena of the Madison Square Garden. We also found drawings of a predecessor of Grand Central Terminal. Lamb had designed a theater for the terminal and ended up with three drawings for the headhouse from the 1890s. And after the talk this morning, I don't have to define what headhouse is. Thank you. Other acquisitions yielded a Bloomingdale House Elevation missing from the Con and Jacobs donation of 1968. That elevation showed up more than three decades later in a donation from somebody who'd worked at the Con and Jacobs firm from that time. And one of my favorites is the survey of the Cast Iron Buildings made by Giorgio Cavallieri's office for Robert Moses, which turned up in the Shadrack Woods material on the Lower Manhattan Expressway. An architect may frequently publish drawings throughout a career, but that does not guarantee the drawings remain in the archive. There are examples in the Frank Lloyd Wright archive, drawings that are very well known in publication, but no longer are part of the archive. Wright and the apprentices also remade drawings, combining elevations with plans or redrawing them, so the published drawings no longer exist as published. And most scholars are surprised to learn there are a few drawings for the Brati-Cerciti model, because the model was built sort of sui generis on its own terms. The remaining drawings reveal specific elements being worked out. In the Roger Ferry collection, his most famous work was these collages that he had done of a Madison Square Park skyscraper that he had made with landscape and farm and animals growing on different floors. And so this was published actually in New York Magazine, but it wasn't in the collection that he had bequeathed to us upon his death, because they were given to his friend and landlord as rent money. Because he was a young 27-year-old with no money at that point. I knew where the collages were, but they were never specifically on offer. Eventually they came up at auction, and I was fortunate to be the winning bid for Avery. What does this mean for architectural historians, preservations, and architects? It means that unlike published material, one is never sure whether the documents needed for a project will remain in the archive, unlike a book where you can expect to receive the same copy any other person can buy. Curators never know when collections will be available, usually at the least likely times, and if one doesn't react quickly, the archive might be destroyed, tossed out, or dispersed. That it would go to another collection is really not the worst case scenario unless it becomes somebody's engagement ring. Curators make assessments of architectural collections based on other people's descriptions and a firsthand examination of the collections. An evaluation is often very difficult. Not every architect who designed important buildings or who played a significant role in historical developments can be researched to find out more about them. At the time that the Ginsburg Archives were offered, I could find only one or two articles on him, and even with internet searching now, there is almost nothing available on him. This slide shows a project by Jack Lessman, who was known as the nightclub doctor. He designed many of the early Las Vegas hotels and nightclubs, and he could come in and redo your restaurant and make it more commercially viable by giving you a different style, like a cowboy coffee shop back in the 1950s. He had designed many of these kinds of commercial spaces, which also are somewhat ephemera, but he had virtually no presence online even today. The collections were based on somebody telling me what projects were in it and looking at the material itself. You have to remember a lot of different types of things. He was friends with Hedy Lamar, the actress, and at the time we acquired the collection, my student assistants didn't know who she was, and I said, well, you know, she was like Madonna of her day, and then that kind of made it there. Other points, just in general, and some of these can come up in the panel discussion. Historic preservationists really need to kind of dig into their understanding of how to find these historical materials. Archives now have an online publishing format called an encoded archival description which publishes finding aids online. And searching, you can find our finding aids just by searching for people's names now online, but you can't use the word drawings because then any drawing by the architect will show up. If you use a word like a library term like papers, you will get Felix Kandela papers and the first thing that will come up is usually our finding aid, describing everything that we have. So for somebody like Cass Gilbert, to find his papers, if you put papers in, you'll see the Historical Society and the Minnesota State Historical Society. If you put in drawings, it'll be all these beautiful drawings that have been published. So learn to know how these things actually are presented to you by the people who are taking care of the things and you'll be much more able to find things as you go further. Another thing is to keep good records of your own firm and especially when you work on significant building. For historic preservationists, that's something that you're always doing, but for architects in general, they may occasionally work on a historic structure. We recently took Frances Halsband's archive and she'd worked on several historic structures, but she hadn't considered that as part of her own work with the same importance as the buildings that she had designed. So I had made a particular point of taking those things too and getting her to understand that that was also part of what we wanted to have. And also, Taliesin Associates, they were the go-to firm to work on Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. So I did take any time they worked on the Wright buildings. Those files also came in. And finally, support your architectural archives, both paper and electronic, and realize that archives needs funds for processing to make the materials available in order to help you do your own work. Thank you very much. Thank you, Janet. Our next speaker is Mehta Borhabad Lopez Pasteur, who is an architect and is the assistant curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she's just begun and where they've just opened a permanent architecture and design galleries. And the title of her talk is Artifacts Fitting into the White Cube, a catalog of impossibilities when collecting architecture. Well, thank you, Andy, for the introduction. Thank you, Jorge, for the invitation to this fantastic day. So the ambition to collect and to exhibit architecture works when displaying something as large and complex as a building or as a city. To mobilize architecture within the institutional space of the museum presents many problematics, but also serves as a contested space to critically operate. This presentation collects a catalog of cases to reflect on the multiple strategies that face this dichotomy presented when having to conceal the one-to-one scale within the walls of the White Cube, but also within the apparatus of the museum within institutional space. It is then a catalog of impossibilities and possibilities presented when collecting architecture. It is then collecting, but it's also exhibiting, and it's also archiving architecture. In 1958, MoMA released the document entitled Background Information on the Department of Architecture and Design, the document that describes the direction in terms of acquisitions and the collection read. In the field of architecture, of course, the museum cannot collect buildings. Collecting and displaying architecture in one-to-one scale, of course, presents the problematics. Obvious is, of course, the matter of a scale itself and how to literally fit a building inside a building. But that is not the only one. Steeneye catalog poses the one-to-one scale might be said to be both the most accessible, but yet the most deciphered of architectural representations, since the one-to-one, inevitably, implies a reference or a built object. Whereas, when architecture is seen as a medium that crosses different media and disciplines, then the architecture becomes more than a building. It becomes an expanded apparatus. And it's under that critical lens that I want to present the following cases to problematize the paradoxes that architecture presents when being collected and curated, and also understand the use of one-to-one artifacts as a strategy, as stable or un-stable, as other means of architectural representation. The first case is the Francis Little House by Frangio Wright. The house commissioned in 1912 and completed in 1920 was located in Minnesota. However, the current geolocalization of the house entangles a much more complex description. In 1972, the owners wanted to demolish the house to be able to use the land to build another house. The final demolition took part, luckily enough, after the Metropolitan Museum purchased the house. The med dismantled piece by piece and labeled, created, and stored to await the completion of the museum's New American win. The house stayed in the storage, if that census can even make sense, until 1982 that it was installed. And maybe the fitting situation makes sense because in the time that they were waiting, the whole house was distributed along several museums. The living room stayed at the med, and it is now one of the many period rooms on view today. The installation of this room was privileged enough to be located into a gallery with access to central parks. So then the windows that were designed to look to the woods are today looking at some twist too, but just maybe different ones. An interesting move and maybe critical to protect the aura of the original through the discursive approach. The library went to Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, currently on view as one of the most important period rooms. Then the window panels from the billiard room went to Dallas Museum of Art and a couple of them also to the Art Institute, on view but in the Fragments Gallery. The hallway went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and is also on view as one of the period rooms. The house is not a house anymore, but a complex fragmentation named as period rooms or architectural fragments. Period rooms are paradoxical devices and even more when talking about display in architecture. Period rooms understood as an exhibition device were meant to recreate the interior that our object was curated for as it was somehow its natural setting. That understanding implied the arrival of architecture within the wall of the museum but as a background set. However, the period room can be also read not as an exhibition device, but as the exhibited historical remnant. However, as an exhibition device, the period rooms were displaced by the white cube. As Angelidakis proposes, as the white cube is still ever present, could we say it's a period room itself, our contemporary period room? If that is the case, how to keep it and collect it if possible. With the preservation of a white wall with layers and layers of white paint into one possible... the one-to-one artifact to be collected? Well, this is the following case. Mural was a wall from MoMA that had an interesting display in it. Mural is the name of an installation at Whitney. It is also a wall that was at MoMA before. It is also a video that MoMA traces the wall from MoMA to the Whitney. But Mural, it's also a performance. A perform emulation of a wall. In 2003, Dealer Escofirio did a retrospective exhibition called Scanning, the aberrant architectures of Dealer Escofirio at the Whitney Museum. At that time, while MoMA was undergoing renovation and the gallery was the home of the contractor's office, that allowed them to propose the removal of a wall from MoMA and bring it to the Whitney. The fragment showing the original white color and the layers of paint built up over the years was grafted to a bigger network of white walls within the Whitney Museum in an installation called Mural, in which these walls were pierced randomly by a program drill ruining on the track, as you have seen. But talking about white walls, what makes one to be a specific one and not any wall? The original setting of the wall in MoMA's collection galleries was once home to the enigmatic war three standard stoppages by Marcel Duchamp. The white wall was not then an anonymous wall, but a wall loaded of identity and reenacted through the holes. The holes initially begin as lone blemishes on the pristine white walls, but as the exhibition continues, the walls become increasingly perforated. Eventually, holes on both sides of the walls align, opening views from gallery to gallery. Clusters of holes randomly open up sections of wall surfaces, making the wall increasingly unstable. The three month performance work progressively contaminates the gallery with a constant background drone, visual distractions and light leaks. Rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display, the white walls actively compete for attention, thus resizing total submission to the collecting and mediating function of the museum retrospective. Once the exhibition was over, the wall of what remained was demolished. The existing traces of this notice is a video belonging to the MoMA collection that follows the movement of the wall from MoMA to the Whitney. From a probably very interventioning proposition within an architectural fragment to the opposite extreme, the following case precisely speaks to the extreme preservation of a whole house. Do not touch and keep it as it is. The paradigm of the original is most requested within this case. Una Bomber was the house of the American anarchist, mathematics and serial murderer, Katinski. It was also the headquarters from where he produced and mailed numbers bombs, ultimately killing a total of three people and injuring other 23 from the 1978 to 1995. In 2006, a court ordered that all the items sized in the 1996 arrest of Katinski, including the cabin itself, be auctioned off with the proceedings going to the victims of his bombing campaign. The auction raised $232 and Katinski's cabin was obtained by the new museum in Washington, D.C. The house then was moved from the FBI storage to the museum in Washington. But the whole trip that this house faced was not even that simple. The initial plan by the court trying the case was to bring jury to view the cabin in Montana. However, this was not feasible. Then a replica had been made out of the cabin, but the court did not feel it would provide jurors with a realistic understanding of the defendant. Finally, authorities requested to move the house and bring it to the FBI storage where it would be examined and properly testified. The architecture testimony was then brought through the exhaustive keeping of its interiors, but does it bring the complete testimony? His defense team tried to present his cabin as one of the most significant pieces of evidence of his insanity. The street aesthetics of simplicity, natural materials, craftsmanship, and geometric purity have since become symbolic of disturbing acts of terror. Forever, blemishing the image of the idyllic little house on the prayer. How much of the building was accomplished of that terrorist activity and how much was the site, the isolated surrounding part of that too? How much of the original architecture has been mobilized and truly represented even though the whole house, the whole architecture artifact was mobilized first to the FBI storage and later to the museum? The last case also presents a full artifact, not a fragment, not just the surface and wood paneling, but just the whole thing. And precisely because of that might seem to be the most simple and easy case in terms of collecting architecture. This is one of the Charlotte Perion most important contributions and noble design for kitchens and bathrooms that allowed the units to be produced outside and plugged into the building structure produced for a ski resort in the Alps. The building made its way from the Alps to first garage in a private home in Chicago, Illinois. The owner fell in love within this unit and tried to install that in his own house. We're lucky that that never happened and two years ago, 2014, the Art Institute moved these units from his garage to the museum. As seen, it does fit in the gallery the whole thing. Easy, right? But also how far is this image from the existing context where it was inscribed? Not that much. As said, it seems to be the most clear and easy situation to discussion to discuss the one-to-one scale, the architectural artifact and the capacity to experience the architecture in person and fully. But is that all? Maybe this is just a problem of nomenclature, but is this a room? Is this a design object? A completed object then? Or is it a fragment? It is a whole thing itself, or is it a fragment belonging to a complex infrastructure of a bigger scale, a building? Can we be back to the last... This collection of one-to-one artifacts, as bizarre as it might be, have something in common. They all inhabited once a very specific site and a very specific context. But now, all they live within the museum. The concept of archive, along with the concept of collecting, of exhibition, of reproduction and registration of space and relationship to both architecture and curatorial processes. Period rooms, fragments, full buildings, architecture units, they are all now inside of a museum. However, how much do these one-to-one artifacts represent something as elusive as an architectural experience that unfolds in a space and time? When displaying those one-to-one artifacts, I wonder how much are we being able to mobilize of what these artifact architectures are? And so, how much of their cultural and political framers are we being able to mobilize? Thank you. So, our next speaker is Ken Bissell. Last night, he said that he was from Turkey via San Diego, where he is in San Diego a professor of history and theory of architecture at the University of San Diego. And he is going to be talking on wither the Archaeology Museum Ex situ in situ in London and Athens about the Parthenon, that very controversial Parthenon Museum. Thank you, Professor Dahlkart. I also would like to thank Professor Jorge Otero-Pylos for inviting me and for organizing this event. I'm really, really delighted to be among such distinguished people. The Greek government's decision to construct a new Acropolis Museum in Athens was understood as a political act. A modern day response to an event that had transpired much earlier, which many in Greece understood as an original violence perpetuated against their heritage. In the early 19th century, the agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed about half of the Parthenon's surviving sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis. The fragments of the Parthenon frieze, metopes and pediments were either collected from the grounds where they had been scattered or pried off from the architectural ruins. Acquired by the British government after rankerous debates, the Elgin marbles have been on display in the British Museum nearly continuously since 1817. Either overlooked or left behind by Elgin's men, a significant portion of the Parthenon sculptures remained in Athens, while other fragments were dispersed to various European collections. Whereas the restitution of the Parthenon marbles had been official policy of the Hellenic state since 1981, the construction of the new Acropolis Museum to replace this one marked a shift in the discourse. Whereas the restitution of the Parthenon marbles had been so has been basically at the beginning based on this idea of a nation's right to own or to the title of the material culture. Now from now on, actually, we are going to have a certain emphasis on the aesthetic unity of Parthenon. The partition of the Parthenon sculptures between London and Athens and their separation from their original architectural context devalued the aesthetic experience of a masterpiece or so believed the supporters of repatriation. This aesthetic turn in what is otherwise, of course, a political campaign raised two interesting questions. First, it was clear from the beginning that no matter what or what the Greeks do the British were not going to return the marbles. How would the architecture of the new Acropolis Museum deal with the missing sculptures? In 2003 Hellenic administrative culture, Evangelos Venizelos suggested that until Britain returns the marbles to Greece and I quote, the spaces for the metopes, frees and figures of the pediment will remain void in the new museum as a constant reminder of Britain's unfulfilled depth to the world heritage. So would the Acropolis Museum which is, of course, world famous for its own holdings of Greek art even as a counter monument that laments over Elgin's loot indefinitely? A museum that showcases rather than the presence of the works it possesses basically the sculptures it misses in the form of a void a museum of conspicuous absence. So now we are very fortunate that my colleague Mary Lending is here because she has written an excellent article about that The second question is equally compelling. Due to Athens atmospheric pollution the sculptures that remain in Athens too they had to be removed to a museum. Even if the Parthenon marbles were reunified as the Greeks were asking or us are asking they would no longer be restored to their original location on the Parthenon's ruins. The new museum does have to capitalize on site specificity while at the same time engaging in ex situ preservation. The removal of the Parthenon sculptures from their original location in the early 19th century and subsequent efforts to recreate the aesthetic context for their display in the British Museum were among the foundational questions of our disciplines whether you are from historic preservation or actually a museology. Generations of critics have found the architectural envelope of the British Museum somehow lacking. The museum was often understood as an imperfect if necessary substitute for the original context of art. In the 200 year history of the Elgin marbles in London various contexts have presented themselves. The changes in the display of the sculptures were occasionally aligned with a paradigm change such as the rise of historicism. In the mid 19th century the Greek and Roman sculptures were reordered from an aesthetic and architectural series into a historical series. In other words the sculptures of the museum were presented as transitional specimens in a historical chain of art instead of completing them into an architectural ensemble. In the 1920s in contrast it distinctly anti-historicist approach promised to sweep away what had remained of those Victorian interiors of the 19th century and isolate sculptural fragments in the gallery perhaps as a harbinger of modernist aesthetics even in Britain. So things turn out quite differently in London and the promise of displaying the fragments of the Parthenon as detached works of art was aborted. This is mostly due to the influence of Lord Duveen a wealthy art dealer with offices in London, New York and Paris who was basically mostly in the business of selling interiors to wealthy Americans or the Novorish actually privately funded a major overhaul of the sculptural galleries of the British Museum in 1930s leading to today's Duveen gallery. Duveen insisted on offering the commission to John Russell Pope a Bozar train American architect who had designed some of the better known neoclassical buildings here in the United States. The architectural renderings that Pope sent to Lord Duveen between 1930 and 1932 suggest that he assigned a new decorative function for the Algin marbles in a theatrical interior. Pope's design hardly amounted to a reconstruction of the original configuration of Parthenon. In fact the opposite is true unlike the earlier presentation in the British Museum that had spaced out the sculptures and left the places of the missing ones as a void especially the very first design that Pope sent completely condensed the sculptures into a falsely complete series. It is as if like he was trying to hide the fact that half of the marbles are in Athens but not all of it is in London. Duveen and Pope's approach that subjugated the fragments of the Parthenon sculptures into a modern neoclassical interior was not aligned with the emerging discourse of authenticity or archaeological authenticity in the 20th century at all. As a matter of fact it's quite anachronistic. The institute conservation was propelled by a rejection of the museum's neoclassical frame in favor of an authentic Athenian landscape. Among the institute practices that change archaeological conservation in the first decades of the 20th century we should count Nikolas Balanos Anestilosis the stage reassembly of the ruins which you see in this classic before and after picture. So even though the image that Balanos gave to the Acropolis is very constructed of course we are all trained to think of it as authentic so there is not much of the complexity of the site of the previous histories that are represented here. But Athens remained to be really the place of interesting experimentation among the institute practices that change basically landscape and especially this poetics of the institute culminated in 1950s in Dimitris Pikionis landscaping of the paths around the Acropolis, a design that inspired of course presentation of archaeological sites around the world. How to build a new museum in Athens for the reunification of Parton on Marbles took a fascinating direction between 1976 and 2000 during a series of architectural competitions. I shall focus today on the winning project and in the very last competition and the resulting building designed by Bernard Chumi and associates in collaboration with the Athens based architect Michael Fotiaidis. At first sight Bernard Chumi was I believe dean here at the time seems an unlikely architect to design a context for monumental sculptures. He had made a name for himself in 1980s as an architectural theorist and as the author of avant-garde experiments that specifically reject contextualism. So now Chumi and Fotiaidis basically competition project and resulting building amounts to a bit of a montage of unrelated parts at the ground and middle and the top level. So raised over over pilotes the building hovers over an actual archaeological site in the Macriani neighborhood on the southern foothills of the Acropolis. So that makes the museum actually incredibly interesting because it is not just a blank area but it is an actual urban and archaeological context that cannot simply be abstracted into a museum backdrop. Connecting the entrance level to the first floor Chumi designed a wide and gently sloping glass ramp. The first floor of the museum accommodates the archaic gallery with basically sculptures into a forest of columns without dedicated backdrops which is very controversial. And but of course what I want to especially talk about is this because much of the poetics of basically this museum is achieved thanks to this reciprocity that's visual reciprocity is Chumi's work between the museum and the Parthenon for which the top of the museum or the gallery is a substitute. Chumi articulated here a distinct volume which reproduces the outlines of the footprint of the Parthenon which is also tilted at an angle to exactly parallel the original orientation of the ancient temple. In retrospect this proved to be a brilliant decision the jurors were won over by the suggestion that the Parthenon sculptures would be installed in the gallery at an angle that faithfully reproduces their original orientation thus exposing the sculptures to sunlight at an exact angle. The installation of the Parthenon sculptures in the gallery is the outcome of a close collaboration between Chumi and the museum director Dimitri Pandermalis. The original slabs of the frees that remained in Greece and some occasional fragments that were returned by other museums to Athens are installed along with plaster casts of the marbles that are currently in the British Museum. Reunified of sorts the Parthenon frees is restored to an approximation of the original sequence and wrapped at eye level around the core that simulates the plan of the cellar of the Parthenon. The inclusion of the plaster copies along with originals may suggest a return to mid-19th century practice in Pandermalis and Chumi's reconstruction the idea of restoring the Parthenon sculptures into a complete set took precedence. Where there was no evidence the location of the missing fragment is left unoccupied. A second layer of display consists of this which is basically the metopes right which are basically installed in front of the frees which is behind here and between these metallic columns that are somehow reproducing the rhythm of the Doric order. Finally okay sorry finally we have a third layer at the east and the west end of the gallery which consists of the pediment sculptures here cobbled together on a continuous plant out of original fragments and plaster cast. So in order to achieve the aesthetic communion of the Parthenon sculptures in the museum with the original site Chumi glazed the facades of the Parthenon gallery stunning views of the acropolis can be observed through a double-glazed transparent curtain mold on the northern site as such the design concept appears here powerful and simple. The Parthenon gallery offers two privileged views on the east and west ends of the gallery facing north toward the acropolis. Here the observer sees the pediment sculptures against a view of the acropolis the sacred rock. This is the museum's official picture that you are seeing here used in museum publications also for promotional purposes and this is the picture that I took there when I was exactly in the same place since the sculptures are seen with ambient light during most of the day the bright yellow and green patches of the acropolis in the background lights up through the north window as a bright screen. The unusual relation of figure which would be the Parthenon sculptures and the ground the acropolis landscape is reversed. The pediment sculptures become more of a transparent filter if not an anchor that orients the viewer's gaze back to the acropolis. A closer analysis reveals that the transparency of the Parthenon gallery is carefully constructed. The gradient of black dots that you might actually see here on the silk screen glasses does not only of course control excessive heat and light but also blur the view of the museum's immediate urban surrounding. Furthermore thanks to the tilted angle of the top floor sitting on a much larger base the visual field of an observer looking out from the Parthenon gallery is framed from below by a large platform so basically of course extending to a face the surroundings again or the Macriani neighborhood. The visual effect of this frame is dramatic especially through the south window of the Parthenon gallery. So here the platform extending toward the horizon expunges the view of the urban context and then instead presents you some sort of a higher and more imaginary Attica landscape. In order to achieve a pristine uninterrupted visual field between the museum and the Acropolis the museum administration sought to demolish the buildings in front of the museum in 2007. One of those buildings was a historically registered Ardeco-Rohaus and the building and what remained of the Macriani neighborhood's urban age was saved thanks to the mobilization of the Greek architects, conservation community and the ECOMOS. I think the most obvious conclusion here is that Chumi and Associates design a new kind of museum that spectacularizes Athens site specific heritage. If the universal museum was an expression of the age of mass in the 19th century this new museum is far more fitting for the network of world heritage sites of our own era. There are a number of registers where this change seems to have occurred. First the museum is designed for mass tourism for crowds constantly in motion. And secondly we no longer talk about context in the 19th century in the sense of the word. So context is replaced by a series of transparent frames architecture no longer approximates context it frames the site. The Partidon Gallery's transparency is supposed to provide an unobtrusive frame for sculptures short of leaving them in situ in Partidon. Unlike the British Museum which had provided a series of interiors for the Partidon sculptures there is no articulated interior in the museum but only climate controlled optical frames and transitional spaces that vaguely resemble an outdoors promenade. On another level what this gallery really achieves and how it serves the political goals of the museum's patrons is far from obvious. The aim was perhaps to essentialize the sculptures relation with the original site through the construction of transparency and thus to transcend the inauthentic neoclassicism of the Duveen Gallery in the British Museum to provide an architectural substitute for a better experience of the sculptures. If this is the case it is quite paradoxical that we need to draw the shades or else the sculptures will be obscured by an overexposed and glaring landscape. What is fascinating is the new gallery's power to frame the acropolis the mouillons of the double-glazed wall subdivided and then stitched the fragments together a precise framing of the acropolis from a camera obscura of sorts an architectural viewing machine. The feeling is not proximity or reciprocity but longing. It is as if to say that the effects of algenism could never be reversed or redeemed. Thank you. Thank you. So our final speaker in this panel is Mary Lending professor of history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and her paper is Invented in situ plaster casts and architectural canonization I can't read my handwriting here so Invented ex situ that's the short title of it. Okay. So I cannot resist showing you the cover of this book around for real next week. However, the reason is not purely my own excitement. The image on the cover is presumably depicting an iconic Roman monument namely a portion of the temple of Castor and Pollux at the Roman Forum. Yet, this is an object that surely is complicating notions of in and ex situ and the fluctuating places of monuments. I will return to that in a moment. Seen from an American perspective the grand collections of architectural plaster casts that were installed in museums towards the end of the 19th century were often discussed as a substitute of the grand tour as a democratization of this elitist European tradition. Presenting architectural architectural historical architecture on full scale in three dimensions and in chronological order, the idea was that audiences who could not check through Europe and experience the monuments firsthand in situ could promenade through time and space in the galleries. The few who travel much failed to remember that the masses of the people traveled but little and Rukarnagim used at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition exposed to a lavish installation of medieval French monuments. Here are two of these plaster monuments as later at the Art Institute in Chicago sparking Carnegie's determination to give his hometown a splendid architecture collection. Produced in Paris they replicated parts of the collection of the monuments exhibited at the Musée des Cultures Comparées inaugurated a decade earlier quoting, if they cannot go to the objects which lure people abroad, we shall do the best to bring the rarest of those objects to them at home. He also pledged assuring his fellow Pittsburghers that they could safely pursue their everyday lives while enjoying some of the pleasures and benefits of travel abroad. This is the still existing hall of architecture at the Carnegie Institute as installed with a number of French monuments in 1907. However, the ambition to present an all-encompassing display of architecture from across time and place was nowhere more good than here in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art set out to surface the best European collections, including the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, the South Kensington Museum, and the two distinct Parisian collections respectively, called the Bazaar and the Musée des Cultures Comparées. When claiming that the new collection would have European scholars come to New York as they now live in Rome, Athens, or the other great centers of the study of art, the Met's inventively inverted the main reason given for cast collecting in the U.S. Not only would this high end assembly of monuments make cumbersome traveling obsolete. When suggesting that even scholars would have to come to New York to fundamentally grasp the history of monuments in the New Museum in Central Park, this ambitious assembly of cast also rendered the original monument obsolete, thus defining a new place of origin, a new in situ, so to speak. One might be forgiven for assuming that this idea of the reproduction trumping the original was a particularly American sentiment. After all, American museums in the late 19th century hardly had artworks and antiquities to match their rising museum aspirations and American participation in archaeological digs were rare of obvious geopolitical reasons. But this sentiment was by no means exclusively American. In fact, the idea of the cast quartz as a surrogate from the Grand Tour sprang from the very core of elitist Grand Tour culture. While creating his home museum, John Soan was in 1812 fantasizing about what posterity would make of his plaster heaven of ancient works or rather copies of them for many are nuts of stone or marble. Soan brought his Royal Academy students to Lincoln's infields every week and to give those who could not visit Greece and Italy some better idea of ancient works than would be conveyed through the medium of drawings or prints. Likewise, metaphors of traveling saturated the presentation of the most celebrated building in the world in the 10 architecture courts that opened in 1854 in the relocated Grystal Palace at Sydenham. Here, visitor tourists were offered a virtual Grand Tour into what was unattainable except by laborious foreign travel. When the Metropolitan in 1891 claimed that even European scholars would have to come to New York to study the great monuments of the past, it might perhaps sound a bit surprising. Yet, the museum did nothing but corroborating a typical 19th century topos. The idea that architecture was not only better understood excite in the museum but also as reproductions. After having toured the continent in 1851 Charles Newton of the British Museum lamented the randomness governing most museums. A decade before excavating the mausoleum of Halicarnassus an event soon followed by the introduction of them is on Machiafrise on the international caste market while the marble fragments were installed in London. Newton concluded that the great principle of chronological arrangement was achievable only through a well collection, well selected museum of castes. Only reproductions could depict the history of monuments in what he called synoptical and simultaneous view when launching the ideal of perfect historical sequences to be admired by large audiences. Quoting, the great task of archaeology, comparison though much promoted by the facilities of modern travelling is still greatly hindered by the inability of memory to transport from place to place and to recall at intervals of time those finer distinctions and resemblances of which classification mainly depends and which no drawing or engraving of the copyist can adequately convey according to Newton. In Paris, Violet Le Duc had for decades championed a museum of castes when the Musée à Disculpture comparée was incorporated in 1879. The French restoration architect presented the initiative the only museum run under the patronage of the Historic Monuments Commission as an act of preservation in its own right. Chronologically curated the fragments would reveal affinities, relations and influences undetectable in the fragmented reality of the real world and show perfectly lit and mounted versions of the deteriorating original outside curatorial control. Its directors and curators insisted that a cast had the complete scientific value of the original and that a perfect cast is not only more exact than the original but in its plaster perfection closer to the monuments moment of origin and thus in a sense closer to the original than the original itself. Preserved in plaster the monuments well known as well as less familiar buildings dispersed throughout the provinces and exposed to negligence and destruction exposed evolution in form and style fulfilling the ambition of displaying it all in one chronological and synoptical view. In Paris however the cast did not spring from excavation but from restoration they depicted portions of buildings still in use rather than ruins and rather than showing works already scattered throughout museums it showed fragments of buildings scattered throughout France. All in all the museum was inventing in plaster perfection the French past as a solid tradition of stylistic development. So this little historiographical plaster rhapsody suggests that the cast courts were an important locus to invent and present history as chronology an effort that could obviously only take place off-site. These moving monuments were all about travelling with their own itineraries and mounted in galleries they worked as time machines allowing audiences to travel in both time and space into a full scale architectural history. Yet there were other inventions in play of a subtler kind than this mere chronologising in situ of monuments. So let me show you a few examples of how the plaster monuments deconstructed conventional notions of in situ by introducing twisted conceptions of the ex situ in the making and preservation of monuments. Obviously the detachment of the travelling monuments from historical and geographical origins lent them new significance. At the Monsieur de Sculpture Comparé for instance, the French monuments were heralded as a complete series. In the galleries, the castes merged to produce an unprecedented panorama of a national architecture as an evolutionary continuum framed by masterpieces of classical architecture. However, as museums on both sides of the Atlantic purchased these serialised national monuments, they were transplanted into new agendas and curatorial programmes. Accordingly, their meaning and function changed. Establishing perfection of sight, the reproductions were imagines to redirect the itineraries of contemporary grand tourists as well. One of these productions was the awe-inspiring French version of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. An obligatory destination for grand tourists for centuries, the Temple Ruin in Rome was a staple for Bazaar students' exercises in depicting ruins on paper in two temporalities in its actual and its restored state. The convention of restoring monuments to a presumed pristine state had become part of a broader visual culture when, for instance, John Soane sent his student Henry Park to Rome to make a perfect version of his favourite Roman monument to use in his annual lecture on the classical orders at the Royal Academy in London. Soane collected this monument across materials, media, temporalities and scale from full-scale castes, scale models in plaster and quark, to two-dimensional interpretations on paper and canvas. Oscillating between documentary depictions and idealised conceptions, they testify to a monument in flux, in and ex-situ. As Félix Dubin was covering the courtyard of the De Bazaar with a glass ceiling, the school decided to make the whole thing and display it together with the northwest corner of the Parthenon. When inaugurated in 1877, these two canonical specimens of the Doric and Corinthian waters faced each other across the Parthenon. While the Parthenon had been commissioned by the Commissure de Monomar historique during an archaeological expedition in 1844, the Roman monument was an entirely in-house affair. Amplifying the inventive dimension at work when realising on full-scale the imagined perfection of antiquity or antique monuments, it was the result of the combined efforts of Priderom recipients and incredibly skilled molders. In 1870, Charles Deter, the future architect of the Palais de Machine, at the 1889 exposition in Paris, arrived in Rome and found the ruins scaffolded. Planned by Dubin and based on Deter's restorations on paper, drawings praised for their archaeological accuracy, it took almost two years to erect a restored version of one of the great monuments of Augustine Rome with the crucial assistance of the school's chief Mulder, Alexandre de Sacchi. Strikingly, the reconstitution contains only two columns, while the ruin's celebrity was inseparable from its iconic three columns. This full-scale Parisian version made a new conception of the ruin with its highly stylized entablature resting on two flawless capitals. Rather than communicating a dilapidated remnant of antiquity, the fragment re-represented an imaginary ideal whole. A leading concerns of decay and material historicity, it presented a spotless, gloriously historical monument. As part of the students' everyday environment, the cast was designated to display the perfection of antiquity, not the passing of time. So, when the mastermind of the Metropolitan Collection, a Harvard-trained archaeologist later the museum's director boasted that scholars would have to come to New York to fully grasp the history of monuments, he was echoing an inventive plaster entrepreneur. While working on this entirely French version of the Roman monuments in Paris, Deter declared a little ode to the ex-Situ experience of antiquity. Eventually he said, the marble fragments in Situ, in Rome, would be scattered on the forum exposed to impious travelers little hammers. But soon they called a bazaar and finally have recovered these columns. One will have to go to Paris to study one of the most beautiful ancient Corinthian Roman orders. Today, this powerful ex-Situ invention sits in a new ex-Situ habitat. In May 1968, the Cour Vittray was attacked by students as yet another contribution to the French tradition of monument vandalization. From the turmoil, it was rebuilt in Versailles precisely a century after its first direction in Paris testifying to the history of construction, destruction and reconstruction at work in the world of plaster architecture. So let me briefly show you another famous ancient monument in a very different way, a French modern invention and definitely made ex-Situ. After the French excavations at Delphi in the 1890s, the unearthed artifacts remained in Greece due to new legislation. However, the Louvre's Atelier de Moulage boldly translated the debris from the porch of the treasury of the Siphanians into a Greek monument that premiered in Paris at the 1900s exposition. Until the modernist refurbishment of the Darus stairway in 1934, it proudly marked the entrance to the Louvre alongside Nikke of Samotrache and this modern French production you see here, initially a copy without an original soon traveled to museums around the world serving to showcase developments in early Greek architecture by denoting a non-existing structure in Greece. The Carnegie Institute did in fact purchase this work from the Louvre and the same addition that the Louvre discarded is still in fact the one image you see here it's still in fact on display in Pittsburgh today a rare piece and an original in its own right. So let me conclude by with a third version of the invention of architecture that might take place ex situ. 19th century plaster monuments circulated major ruins of antiquity then buildings that had recently been designated historical national monuments as well as architecture from far flung regions. Combined they promised an emerging global history of monuments that could be experienced spatially synoptically and simultaneously. The inclusion of castes from Angkor Wat for instance and also of the Indian temples that appeared in western galleries produced a global portable heritage that could simultaneously speak of eternal ruins and changing presence of and in situ and display timeliness and change. So in the winter of 1869 Lieutenant Henry Hardy Cole a Royal Engineer working with the Archaeological Survey of India and the son of Henry Cole the director of the South Kensington Museum was on a mission to help fulfill his father's vision of a virtually boundless museum. Archives documenting 19th century cast culture provides numerous evidence that the moving of heavy and fragile plaster monuments were no less laborious than the moving of actual buildings. H H Cole's report on the casting of the eastern gateway of the great stupa at Sanky on site provides wonderful insight into the dimension of such an adventurous undertaking with many similarities to archaeologists accounts in terms of planning, equipment competence, logistics and shipping but here the antiquities were displaced through casting not through excavation. More than a hundred people were involved in the casting and this so called painted illustration you see here documenting the operation and the difficulties besetting the transportation of materials through the Indian jungle from Calcutta to Sanky was displayed alongside the 33 foot 12 monument in London. The reproduction traveled for more than three months. It had sailed up the Suez canal only months after its great grand or its grand opening in November 1869 and upon its arrival in London three new additions were made to travel here. So what you see here is the monument under construction in London and as displayed in Brussels as well as during casting in India. When this plaster fixed similar of an ancient Indian gateway landed in London in 1870 it expanded the canon in time and space. The traveling object changed the reception of the Buddhist stupa off site while the in Situ monument was continuously refracted by its portability and reproducibility as the ruin that served the taste of contemporary audiences as Tapatiga Takurta has shown. This geographical expansion prompted synchronizing of non-western histories and the genealogies of non- western objects. Shown in European galleries the temple was folded into the history of western antiquity or as a catalogue entry from 1874 puts it the gateways surrounding the great Buddhist temple at Sankhi are wonderful records of the state of arts in India at the period of the commencement of the Christian era. Although expanded beyond the western tradition the canon continued to be classified within the same developmental timeframe and the process mediated by exhibition and the monuments off site careers as objects and images. This dream cast in plaster was part of a far reaching dream to incorporate all the monuments in the world into a unitary conception of time yet another process that could only happen at Situ. Thank you very much. So thank you all. I thought that was a especially exciting group of speakers and I thought there were a lot of really interesting points that were brought up. I was really happy to hear Janet talk about the issue of the difficulty of these archives and the fact that so many of them are destroyed that so many architects archives don't exist. Students and others are always asking me where can I find the archive of X person and I tell them and then they're shocked. I think people think well everybody's archive of course survives and very few of them don't and the reason I love the Horace Ginsburg archive so much is that it's the one archive of a vernacular architect working in New York. It's the only one of the apartment house architects that survives in New York and I thought when I first read the synopsis of Mata's paper I said well what about the shank house at the Brooklyn Museum which they attempted to move the whole house which you showed at the beginning but didn't really talk about but it really brings up this issue of what happens when a house becomes an accession number at a museum. How does that change what we mean by architecture and I really reflected a lot on what Khan had to say I spent much of my sabbatical last year in London and then I went to Greece for the first time and you go to the British Museum and it's the only gallery where you get a free handout in which they have this incredible propaganda piece about the relocation of the Elgin marbles and then a few weeks later I get to Athens and everybody everything you read is about the theft of the Parthenon marvel so that the politics of this and the interpretation is really really telling and I thought Mary's piece was really brilliant in putting something that we are often dismissive of into an incredibly complex act and I think it's very timely as we are now discussing the issue of digital reproductions which are so life like so real and how that impacts on the authenticity of the real I don't want to use that word but that's the word that comes to mind so what she's talking about I think is really very timely today so one thing that came up and I'd like to ask everybody to speak about are two issues one is the paradox of what we're talking about objects and things moved to museums or casts the authentic architectural element and that's not to say that the cast as you noted that the cast aren't authentic too that issue and also the issue of permanence versus destruction that Janet brought up about are we all of you dealing with the permanent preservation of items that are or are not authentic architectural items and how does that deal with the possible destruction of those items I know that one of the issues with casts was that after World War One those casts were the most valuable thing there was to understand what RAS Cathedral or other destroyed buildings look like so I'd like you maybe all to talk a little bit about issues of the paradoxes that you're talking about and the issue of permanence versus destruction why don't we start with Janet first we'll go around and bring it up to questions from all of you one thing that was I only touched upon is that when the collection becomes available you don't know what the future need for it might be and when I was making choices I was trying to figure out does it have research value will it have further importance and you can't always predict when that will actually come up and I mean the Thomas Lamb you know just as a subject alone was such an interesting thing it documented this incredible legitimate theater that was built throughout the United States and around literally it's a global archive because Lamb built theaters in Cairo and Mumbai and all other places anywhere where the movie industry was and then it has another life as this kind of as these theaters became renovated as part of urban renewal projects and so the theaters in Baltimore the I think is the one on Utah Street was a linchpin into the revitalization of Baltimore I mean when we took the drawings we didn't know that and you're sort of got that you can't tell always and so your I was trying to represent the history of architecture across the board as much as possible given the examples that came across my way at the same time not quite knowing who's going to show up and even the Philip Johnson material you kind of took it as a Johnson you know as a Johnson archive because he's an important figure in 20th century architecture plus it had the cross drawings which also but the recent Schlumberger headquarters that's now been bought by the furniture designers it has now had yet another purpose and you just you were hoping that my sense of what's important by looking at it that way actually becomes important for the buildings and keeping the buildings later but you can't tell I couldn't I mean I was pretty good at guessing I guess but you know there's no guarantee that will happen well I think that to me was really interesting to hear all the presentations and because as a curator at the institute I found myself like Janet presentation Mary presentation like me as a curator I literally operate within an institution that deals within the the founding of the department within the cast that were brought and the same time institution that is and the very beginning of the department in fact it was in the archives it was not a curatorial department it was hosted in the library and that's where so I think that says a lot about the discipline that really differs from how museums host art and architecture because for instance the collection at the institute of architecture started in the in the archives when collecting drawings and to me I think that the paradox was like really seen with all these presentations comes when mobilizing the objects because the objects they're not only the objects but what they do represent politically socially and in context and also where they are but at the same time to me then a curator to me then the question is like how not to necessarily mobilize the architectural artifact but how to mobilize the architectural knowledge and that's the moment that the elements but it's not the only one and the archive is another one and another type of documents and objects that all together talk about the mobilizing the architectural knowledge and that is the contradiction that all comes together in a very specific way within architecture and to me comes a bit more accentuated when that happens inside of an institution as the institute of the Metropolitan Museum that were made on the shape of a different type of structure. So wonderful question so you're asking first of all about authenticity versus reproduction right of the museum displays or gallery displays and then actually Meite's presentation also we are presented with what you call the paradox right which is it starts with the question how can we have a building inside of a building which sounds paradoxical but I guess my answer to that is that it's going to be a historical one our very concept of the authentic is very new so it's really a 20th century early 20th century concept so I can give you lots of examples from epistemological foundations of our own discipline of course which I'm sure you know better than me but I mean when you look at Katremere for example you would see type or when you look at there is the biological sort of idea of the species right so basically up until really the 20th century the architectural the architectural work is not supposed to be very contingent and too different from the type because if it is then you are not complying with something right so so that's a really interesting observation so what happens is like in 1930s is that I mean it's also of course leading finally to completely discarding the castes are inauthentic after the war I mean this is all happening or actually we are starting to look at basically those imaginative reconstructions in museums and we call them oh no this is a fake right so when you start basically saying that it means that somehow the paradigm has changed basically the architectural objects stop being typical and it started being contingent and unique and of course now we are seeing those those as authentic but authentic to the 1930s right so another level of complexity which actually is something that you deal with a lot I would love to continue and I could even because you have written super interesting about authenticity kind of like deconstructing the concept quite solidly in the Pergamon altar and I think that your question to be a little bit blunt like we need to like move on from that kind of false dichotomy and the Parthenon which in my kind of like a little bit weird plaster world is of course we have been talking about plaster Parthenon in this auditorium earlier but it's the superstar also not only also in plaster architecture Parthenon is the superstar and I think that trying to see a little bit more nuanced about what is the architectural object quite close to that via the Parthenon for instance Lord Elgin while he was collecting originals marble let's call it marble fragments he also had lots of castes made in city in Athens in 1801 and shipped them so they are also in the British Museum and they complicate this history of the you know it's something one problem with that museum in Athens is that I don't think it's Jumi's problem but it's the museums I have never come to the bottom they don't want to talk about it like I don't know what castes are on display and you know the banality in the way of displaying those castes because there are so many good castes of that priest also once produced in Athens through the whole 19th century for instance that was a very political piece of illustrated journalism the illustrated London news in 1929 so very close to your Pergamon altar and that wonderful fiction presented over two full spreads images of the frieze in Athens compared to Lord Elgin's castes from 1801 so you see the deterioration in the original which is like you know unlegible by now as we see in so that's what the museum is involuntary displaying right it's a little bit weird that they want to do that and that they aren't prouder about their own very very important participation in the production of the circulating plaster Parthenon which is one of the most important ways to understand that that temple and also because it's so fragmented and so destroyed but the cast are really record so you know for the archival parts of our discussion it's really the 3D archive of the Parthenon is cast and in that so called ephemeral material but it's more solid than marble in the case of the Parthenon the case with drawings it's like assuming that the building and many buildings are destroyed and so I've never quite been as flummoxed by this I can't bring the architect or I can't bring the building into the museum I mean I kind of knew that when I went to a museum I wasn't expecting to see a building when I went inside so I think it's just a trope of how people talk about it but buildings are so complex to make that having another entree into them by looking at drawings or casts or whatever the other thing is is really I think a model the way it would be great to have more information about how paintings are made but people because the painting is a self-contained item that imperative have never been added to it and so you know I've I know I'm collecting drawings I know I can't even tell sometimes that the drawings are as built because that would require comparison that I just can't do in order to make a decision so think of all the buildings that have been torn down that you wouldn't collect I mean we always had that with architects just say well we want the buildings you didn't build too and well why I said well your ideas are in that as well so I find that I maybe we're just going through a phase where you have to talk about the problem of the building and the museum but I never found I never lost any sleep over that one you bring up a really interesting issue that's a contemporary issue when I was in in Athens and I was up at the Parthenon with the former director of antiquities and he told me that as part of the restoration that they're doing now which you all saw the cranes they're planning on putting plaster casts of the metapes and the freeze back on the building and it brings now what you say brings up the issue are they going to so they will cast they will cast them in concrete because it's concrete on the building not plaster I don't know what they're going to cast them but they're putting casts up and are those and the British are supplying the casts for theirs and then the Greeks are supplying the casts for what they have and are they going to cast the from what exists now or from the ones that you have mentioned that were cast before the deterioration and then so the complexity of that that's interesting ok questions I think we have a microphone around hi hello thank you truly illuminating panel I greatly enjoyed and the panel that unfolds the question critical question of a museum the logic the very logic of the museum that is definitely the logic of radical displacement and in this framework I would like to to ask about the concept of spoiler of the spoiler that is actively you know is reactivated these days yeah and there are according to there are two kinds of spoilers one is a fragment of the inserted in a different time frame that brings discrepancies of course in the fabric in the city fabric in the architectural and the other one is the conceptual spoiler that could be a fake spoiler that could be a cast you know that is definitely that should be politically and ideologically charged yeah so basically it brings some narrative behind I wonder how do you personally address this concept of spoiler and how would you perceive it these days I would love to start because I would define spoiler as something that is in use right like it's something like a building element so you reuse it so it's not like for instance the gorgeous display in your great stairway that would be like fragments of ornament beautifully mounted and then you can use elements but for your second definition I need to think about that because then I suddenly thought this is then we're full cycle right because that is ornament that's a new way a contemporary way of defining ornament it sounded very much like that to me so maybe that's what's because if you suddenly if it's something that sits on a building so maybe it's kind of because we have difficulties today discussing ornament so then it's kind of like getting there through synonyms maybe yeah that was just from the top of my head yeah I think that also brings a bit the political context of this displacement I mean it is the spoiler I guess what the winner brings back and when you think about basically the imperial museums in Europe but also in places like New York it has of course a relationship with empire I mean so those great museums have become basically great presentation of the not only empire's own possessions but at the forefront of civilization or its own communion with some glorious past so all these things and when you think about it and you understand the complexity of when it start the object became seen as as precious but at same time as authentic when is it really reified it basically conflict emerges between the whole idea of an empire's style meaning that all these things that we brought are just adding up to a great design versus the whole idea of authenticity of each fragment that's a very long topic so I can talk more about it it's a good idea for a panel okay yes further questions about authenticity when we've been talking about the fabrication of these things from the past I found it difficult to respond to claims of pastness and how the past is experienced in the present from archaeologists like Cornelius Holthorft about the fact that we don't need any physical remains of the past in order to experience that past so it's a mediated experience which can be much better experienced by living it for example or an immersive virtual environment so we're obsessing about these nuanced differences between things that are real and things that are authentic to a certain concept whereas the way that we experience the past is not reliant on any of those things at all so how do we respond to that because you know I'm invested in the physical materials of the past and their ability to have resonance in the present and to be passed to the future but that's not how the past is experienced I think there are like two really interesting things on that comment that one refers to precisely that experience of the past that has brought through history and towards that very contemporary moment like certain ways of problematizing the question right within architecture specifically but then there's the very contemporary moment as a contemporary architecture creator just facing really contemporary material because of facing the problem of translation of space and time that at the end the architecture constructs kind of push you back again to those problematics because they're literally living with the same they're mobilizing across time and across space so thing that you can do in a really expanded situation and talking that as a historical vision of that but it's also a problematic inherent to the nature of architecture that at the same time that maybe when this conversation about like what is authentic or the original that's maybe when it concentrates about a specific object or as a building but architecture what don't consider is not just buildings it's really the whole apparatus so then it's not a building that is more authentic than a drawing so then you can then discuss that problematic within the different types of documents and objects as one type of conversation but then you will always need to face like the problematic architecture as this like really complex apparatus that goes through time and space Okay, it goes off every time I wanted to ask you about the new museum and relationship to the old museums I mean you're all sort of talking about the new museums and the old museums and to do so by taking the cue from Chan's presentation that the Chumi Museum is in a way a new kind of museum more fit for what you call the heritage era or which I thought it was a great term but we should all adopt that, the heritage era but that you define that era as an era of longing as a type of inability to resolve an inability of closure and so I wanted to see if we could push on that a little bit more because what are the kinds of closures that are impossible and so I was wondering whether for example with in both Mari's and Maita's talk that there was the sense that of the 19th century comes a methodological proposition about how to best understand architecture and that is the comparative paradigm and the plaster cast becomes great because you can put this next to that and then you can compare and contrast which is a method for historical understanding and so how would you respond to the idea that one of the things I'm throwing this out one of the ways in which we are unable to find a closure or decolonized preservation to go back to Dean's proposition is the inability to let go of the comparative methodology for historiography that we are still stuck on that and that even the Athens Museum is reliant on a type of comparing contrast between the actual thing and this thing or the authentic and the inauthentic so just the epithet new is always difficult and for instance that new Acropolis Museum to me it's you opened the day today showing us the plans of Skansen in Stockholm and the Open Air Museum in Oslo and they are both topical so you can like walk the nation at least they were intended to be and then of course every system and every museum collapses soon or at some point but the Jimmy Museum is it's topical so it's a very kind of old fashioned you know repeating and the size of course I hide instead of the 12 meters but it's a completely so it's a very it's nothing new the newness is also very ancient because the newness for us having survived the 19th century is the free racing of the statutory on the second floor and nobody shows that floor so it was lovely because that's really the great floor but that was also how statues used to be displayed but and here the contrast of course is the horror of everything the caratids in the former museum so you can see the beautiful here from behind individually you know the loveliest here we ever saw in sculpture so but so new I don't agree that it's like anything new with that museum and new isn't necessarily I think the Greeks will disagree with you disagree not me the Greeks the Greeks will have so what's new so I mean that's actually excellent question of course and but what made me think actually what what is this new heritage museum about right I mean world heritage site world heritage museum are the words that are actually used by the commission and and build this museum the big difference is that in the 19th century museum the experience was all about the interior but then our well furnished architectural interior it can be an American period room or it can be a German style room but in it basically the idea is that everything you bring whether this is architectural spoilia or whether it's actually a cast or some furniture pairing them all together into a affinity but taste the taste of the patron is key and oftentimes basically those interiors for example in Germany and Berlin museums were supposed to be always somehow mimicking the taste of the collector and therefore the experience is that you are in I mean even with the Algin marbles you have basically those that famous painting of the patrons of the museum sitting with them in an interior the experience is that of an interior so in the new heritage or heritage site museum through a long process of course the idea of well furnished architectural interior where a patron mimics the living room of an aristocrat and sits is completely cancelled it had to be partly because the amount of mass tourism is such that you have basically crowds coming no one can basically come and sit down without a beautiful original sculpture so at the end what you end up by having is the new concept the museum speak is archaeological promenade that's what I think Chipperfield David Chipperfield won the new basically master plan of the Berlin's museum island but the transformation is drastic instead of basically having this room or fragment of the museum relate to the city where you can go and experience the interior now everything is redesigned starting with the Louvre of course with I.M.Pay in order to actually have some sort of a large promenade in other words like those spaces the architectural spaces increasingly are no longer about the interior but it's all about some sort of framing of transparency as you walk through and stop to take I don't know selfies so our time is up so I think I'd like us to thank this panel and also to thank Jorge for putting the whole date together thank you very much for all the presentations today really illuminating and opened up a whole new world of ideas about preservation and how we do it so I'm really grateful of the time that you took to really plan these presentations and put them together not to burden you more or everybody else but we are planning an issue of Future Interior on the subject of XC2 preservation that will be due manuscripts are due February 1st and so the call for papers is out is open to anybody who wants to send in a paper so please help us spread the word it would be great to have a double triple quadruple issue very thick with lots of ideas in it but certainly with these talks today I wanted to also let you know that there is a Frito Escobedo professor here now Mexican artist who has a show in the gallery in Beall Hall on a very large sculpture done by an American sculptor for the Olympics that was moved and so there is there is a very interesting exhibit right now across the way you can go through the gates from Columbia University original campus and they are keeping that open for us till 6.30 they normally close at 6 so you can go over there and lastly on our way out there is a student reception outside not technically our reception but we are welcome to crash the party and to move our our bodies over there and enjoy some time together as we close so again thank you all thank you Andrew, Erica for moderating today thank you all for coming