A study in how to handle a fire -- visits to Uppark and Cowdray Castle. Actually, it was not so much on how to handle a fire as how to interpret a place after a fire or diseaster occurs. Uppark country house burned in a fierce fire in 1989, and today there are but only a very few remnants of the fire that remain. The house was rebuilt to the day before the fire, including all the interiors and the collections. While all but at most a dozen of the pieces on the first floor were saved, those not saved were recreated to an exactness of the originals. Here is the question of debate; the pieces that were recreated completely or more than a significant percentage, should they continue to be seen as period pieces? Four busts sitting in niches in the dining room are completely recreated, and yet they were presented to the group as being from 1802-5.
Before coming back to the thought, I want to also share Cowdray Castle. Cowdray burned in 1793 and is currently presented as an architectural ruin. This was a massive Tudor castle with a center courtyard. After being studied and stabilized to prevvent any walls from falling, in the past decade it was opened for tourists to visit. In general, nearly nothing was recreated and that which was was openly discussed.
So, whicch interpretation is better? For whom? Should Cowdray have been returned to its original glory, or possibly should Uppark have been turned into a ruin? Please view pictures of both places on my previous blog entry and share your thoughts.
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I doubt there'd be much disagreement that deceptive practices are a bad thing. Reproductions should most certainly be acknowledged as such. --And that includes pointing out reproductions to visitors in cases where they might be misled into thinking they are viewing originals.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the larger question of which way to go, I think both routes have their merits. I think most people like restorations because they give one the satisfying illusion of being transported into the past. But stabilized ruins can also be very instructive and give an entirely different view of history. In that regard, I've been particularly struck by the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, SC, a luxurious late 19th-century mansion that has been preserved in its 20th-century decay, as if emblematic of the decline of the old Southern aristocracy.
A note on blogging: You mention having trouble cutting and pasting. If you are trying to cut from MS Word into Blogger, it won't work because Word includes huge amounts of unwanted metadata. To delete the metadata, try saving the Word document as a .txt file and then cutting and pasting that text into Blogger. It should work.