The AA and the Cast Museum…
Wandering through the eerie, pandemic-emptied rooms of Bedford Square, one can’t help thinking of the impact these rather eccentrically converted, 18thC spaces have had upon generations of students and teachers – and indeed what the implications of these last 9 months of online platforms might be…
But before Bedford Square, the AA inhabited a still stranger and yet more eccentric world… In 1903, the AA was gifted its first permanent premises, in the form of the Royal Architectural Museum, situated on a dark, narrow street behind Westminster Abbey. Here students studied and worked, cheek by jowl with the largest collection of gothic casts and architectural mouldings in the country. Four stories, crammed from floor to ceiling with rows of casts, woodwork, drawings, brass-rubbings, stained glass and models –alongside original objects, including 14thC sculptural work from the Palace of Westminster and an Egyptian sarcophagus of unknown date… Even Ruskin’s own casts, taken from the ‘stones of Venice’ and shipped back to England were housed here – squirrelled away in a small, claustrophobic room on the ground floor…
As very few photographs survive from the 1900s, it is difficult to get a sense of exactly how the AA co-existed with the museum’s collections. However, the museum’s founding committee were pioneers in the use of photography to document and promote their collections as an educational tool and in the early 1870s commissioned the studio of Bedford Lemere to produce two volumes of photographs – many which focus upon particular series of casts or typologies of ornament but also several which give more general views of the interior…
With the Tufton Street premises emptied of students during the First World War but with the prospect of a much enlarged cohort at the end of hostilities, the museum building was sold to fund the purchase of a lease on a larger, more spacious property in Bedford Square. The majority of the casts were donated to the V&A museum, where they today form the core of the gothic cast courts. It appears to have been a bitter sweet transaction – in the words of A.H Austin Hall, AA President 1915-16, “the mouldings were massacred and the corpses were interred in the South Kensington Museum. I attended in the dual capacity of chief conspirator and chief mourner; in the latter capacity I sent a wreath, which was added to the collection…’
For a full account of the museum and its collections, see Bottoms, E. ‘The Royal Architectural Museum in the light of new documentary evidence’, Journal of the History of Collections (2007, pp 1-25)
Above: Collections of the Royal Architectural Museum, photographed by Bedford Lemere, c1872.
AA premises 1903 – 16, (Royal Architectural Museum), Tufton Street, c1930.