“Reconsidering "Hyperreality": ‘Roman’ Houses and their Gardens (1892-1974)
By Katharine T. von Stackelberg
Umberto Eco’s seminal essay Hyperreality (1986) used the Getty Museum in Malibu, a replica of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, as a paradigmatic example of his thesis that America inherently needed to create sites of historical ‘Disneyfication’ to offset an ingrained cultural alienation. The term ‘hyperreal’ is now generally associated with sites that take anachronistic decorative styles and eclectically recombine into environments that claim to surpass mimicry by creating a fully immersive experience.
Entombing Antiquity: A New Consideration of the Classical Appropriation in the Private Funerary Architecture of New York City
By Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Grant’s Tomb, the public memorial to and tomb of the great Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States, reused many elements of classical architecture. Located in Riverside Park, the tomb’s impressive architecture and its debt to the classical world has been subject of scholarly work (Kahn 1982); however, the tombs of private individuals in New York City, whose architecture also alluded to the classical world, have been virtually ignored.
Domestic Interiors, National Concerns: The “Pompeian Room” as a Metonym in the United States
By Marden Nichols
The extensive and rich reception history of classical architecture poses an interpretive challenge to the study of neo-antique place-making by complicating the identification of visual allusion or intertext. My paper addresses this issue through examination of a case study: the phenomenon of “Pompeian” (or “Pompeian Revival”) interior decoration in elite U.S. houses and hotels from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. I argue that the “Pompeian Room” functioned in the popular press and wider discourse of that era as a metonym for an increasingly inaccessible pseudo-aristocracy.
The History of Human Habitation: Ancient Domestic Architecture in Nineteenth Century Europe
By Shelley Hales
Charles Garnier’s exhibition L’Histoire de l’habitation humaine, designed for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, included several reconstructions of ancient houses. Most famous for the new Paris Opera House, the architect created 44 ‘reconstructions’ of past house-types arranged along a street to allow visitors literally to walk the world.
Domus Redivivus in 19th-c. London: Sir John Soane's Well-Stuffed House-Museum
By Ann Kuttner
I consider here the famous House Museum in Lincoln Fields, London, of the Neo-Classical British architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837) as a singular domus. The House displayed in orderly fashion an enormous number of pictures, works on paper, and a vast library. But the Museum was a sprawling collection of antiquities and casts, supplemented by modern Neo-Classical works, in heterodox assemblage of no discernable governing order within a labyrinth of fantasy architectural spaces.