Invented Ex Situ

Already in their conception, the enormous reproductions of architectural fragments that furnished European and American museums in the last part of the nineteenth century complicated notions of in and ex situ and the fluctuating states of monuments. Mounted in galleries, they worked as time machines, allowing audiences who could not experience the monuments in situ, to travel in both time and space, into a full-scale architectural history. Within an historicist worldview that considered a perfect cast more valuable than an inferior original, and asserted that architecture is best understood in the museum and by means of reproduction, these portable monuments and their itineraries complicated notions of place and origins. Inventing and presenting monuments ex situ, they enhanced the fame of extinct and existing monuments.