The Making and Meaning of Intermediates: Workshop and Syllabus for Students of Architecture

Benjamin Weisgall

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Screen capture from “How was it made? Plaster cast” by the V&A Museum

The following six-week unit is designed for students of art and architecture and others who are already comfortable in the workshop (la boutique) but may be less familiar with the uses and pleasures of historical study (quelque histoire). Using the digital critical edition of Ms. Fr. 640, student-participants will follow the author-practitioner and his interlocutors into an intensive study of early modern molding and casting. This unit adopts the M&K Project’s dual pedagogical approach of conceptual articulation alongside material fabrication, with the ultimate goal of developing research skills in the history of techniques.1 Student-participants will not only learn how to work through actual historical “recipes” for patternmaking and moldmaking, but they will also have the opportunity to think creatively about those techniques in the range of possibilities that they afford. In order to achieve this middle position between historical work and artistic work, the unit takes as its theme the variety of intermediary objects that are inherent to any process of casting.

In a workshop, the final product (for instance, a decorative object made of metal) is the horizon or the goal for the fabricator. However, the assignments for this unit focus on the working objects that circulate before the product is completed. For casting, these include the pattern (i.e., the found or sculpted object to be reproduced), the elements that are added to that pattern (e.g., gates, risers, cores), and the mold itself (even ones that are not quite object-like, like those made of the author-practitioner’s favorite material, “impalpable sand”). Casting recipes even refer to a category of models known as “intermediates,” which represent milestones between the original conception and the final product. Intermediary objects afford the fabricator the opportunity to adjust, repair, and critique the design prior to beginning work on its final form.2 Intermediates are positive models that are made to imitate the final product, much like the final product is often meant to imitate a natural object, but with one exception: intermediates exist prior to the thing they are imitating. That said, the contemporary discourse on art making, including Ms. Fr. 640, suggested that imitation could be anticipatory and not just reactive. For instance, the argument was made that finely made art objects, aside from looking like the real thing, could actually reveal the “nature” of that thing.3 In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this kind of hands-on knowledge-making, which had hitherto been largely ignored by an Aristotelian tradition that held artistic production in low regard, blossomed.4 The contention of this unit is that the imitation performed by intermediary objects vis-à-vis final products entails an analogous kind of knowledge-making. If art can capture the “essence” of natural objects, then intermediates can be understood to convey the “technical essence” of art objects.5 Whereas something’s essence has to do with “what it is,” its technical essence pertains instead to “how it is.” In the case of art objects, technical definitions are concerned primarily with the ways in which things are made. This focus on technique reflects the M&K Project’s emphasis on “process over product.” However, intermediates are themselves objects — durable, recognizable and thing-like.6 Therefore, they call into question any description of technical essence that maintains a hard distinction between processes as actions and products as things. In short, intermediates are objects coming into being.

The primary difference between an intermediate and its corresponding final product is material composition.7 In the sixteenth-century workshop, intermediate models were often made of clay or wax, which allow for extended or infinite working time but are vulnerable to decay. This type of model was almost always destroyed or lost in the course of producing the final cast, meaning the final form could only be produced once. However, if more than one copy or more than one version of a model was desired, the premiere material was plaster.8 Although it is usually associated with the rise of archaeological science and public museums, casting with plaster was an ancient technique for reproducing artifacts and working iteratively.9 During the sixteenth century, molding with plaster became another crucial technique for reproducing objects through a process known as indirect casting.10 Initially developed as a means of making multiples in bronze, this method of making multipart plaster molds without destroying the original object laid the foundation for the explosion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of plaster copies of master works. Thus, a secondary focus of this unit is on plaster as a paradigmatic intermediary material. Compared to wax or clay, plaster can more easily be made to imitate other materials. Not only could plaster be painted to look like stone or even bronze, but unfinished plaster was often construed as a stand-in for white marble.11

The first half of the syllabus is a fast-paced introduction to early modern casting through relevant entries in Ms. Fr. 640 and research essays in the Edition as well as other secondary literature. Beginning with the author-practitioner’s idiosyncratic method of casting sulfur into the pith of baked bread, student-participants will move through a short series of historical reconstructions designed to acquaint them with a variety of materials and methods. The ultimate goal of the first half is to develop two complementary skills relevant to the historiography of techniques: one, close reading of recipes and other technical literature, and two, creative work (in the studio or lab) that follows the objects rather than the text. The second half of the syllabus applies these skills to an indirect casting project, in which a complex object is molded in plaster pieces and then cast in plaster. A final short assignment introduces technical writing as its own kind of craft by asking students to describe how a particular object was made. The overall aim is for student-participants to move beyond an understanding of history as that which ought to be emulated or as that which has determined the present. In contrast to these static attitudes towards the past, and in concert with the iterative methods in Ms. Fr. 640 and similar how-to manuals, the approach to history fostered by this unit will be skeptical insofar as the past is understood, like the present, to be a field of possibility.

Syllabus

Week 1 / Intermediary objects and historical study

Week 2 / Introduction to casting through Ms. Fr. 640

  • Entries from the manuscript on casting

  • Rozemarijn Landsman and Jonah Rowen, “Uses of Sulfur for Casting,” in Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project (2020)

  • Emma Le Pouésard, “Bread as a Mediating Material: Tactile Memory and Touch,” in Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project (2020)

Week 3 / Modeling as a technique

  • Assignment: from found object to wax object to plaster object

Week 4 / Indirect casting, part 1

  • Assignment: piece-molding a complex object

Week 5 / Indirect casting, part 2

  • [no reading]
  • Assignment: casting a complex object with a multipart mold

Week 6 / Between reproduction and innovation

  • Assignment: technical writing, or, the genre of how-to

  1. For a statement about the pedagogical possibilities that exist alongside this type of historical research, see Pamela H. Smith, “Making the Edition of Ms. Fr. 640.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano. Making and Knowing Project, 2020. https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/essays/ann_329_ie_19. As a subdiscipline, the history of techniques can be traced to the work of French historians of technology, such as Bertrand Gille, whose monumental Histoire des techniques (1977) placed technology squarely within the Aristotelian category of nature (physis), or, that which changes. The ambiguity of meaning of French word la technique, which can connote both machine activity and manual skill, is exploited heavily within this historiographical tradition. For an early expression, see the collection of essays by Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Maurice Halbwachs and others, under the title “Techniques et machinisme,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 6 (1934): 606-630. One must include the work of paleo-anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan in this bibliography, for instance his Milieu et Techniques (1945). ↩︎

  2. Without making too rigid of a distinction, it would be useful here to distinguish between an intermediate object and an unfinished, or non finito, artwork. Whereas the latter simply needs more work or at least is made to look like it needs more work, an intermediary object, such as a mold, is, in an important sense, complete. On the non finito work in the Renaissance, see Andrea Bayer, “Renaissance Views of the Unfinished.” In Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, edited by Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. ↩︎

  3. For an analysis of this perspective in the recipe for “counterfeit jasper” in Ms. Fr. 640, see Isabella Lores-Chavez, “Imitating Raw Nature.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano. New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020. https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/essays/ann_045_fa_16. For a broader argument about how the histories of craft and science comprise a single research agenda, see Pamela H. Smith, “Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy.” In Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. ↩︎

  4. See Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004; and Pamela Long, Artisan Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011. ↩︎

  5. On technical essence, or “technicity,” see the work of another French philosopher of techniques, Gilbert Simondon, especially chapter 2 of his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ↩︎

  6. Again, without drawing too stark of a contrast, intermediates can be distinguished from work which might be called ephemeral art. This category includes objects for theater, banquets, and ceremonies. Unlike intermediary objects, ephemeral works, despite their short life, were intended as final products. ↩︎

  7. Another important difference was size, but for the purposes of this unit, size is an issue that correlates strongly with material via the question of weight. For the most important contemporary discourse on the relation between size and material, which in fact takes as its starting point the question of a model’s relation to nature, see the First Day of Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Translated by Alfonso de Salvio and Henry Crew. New York: Dover Publications, 1914. ↩︎

  8. There were at least two broad categories of plaster in the Renaissance: gesso, or plaster made of gypsum and used primarily by painters; and calcina, or plaster made of lime and used by sculptors and builders. This latter category is sometimes referred to as stucco but inconsistently so. Although material distinctions are certainly an important issue for this unit, this short essay uses the English term plaster rather indiscriminately. ↩︎

  9. On early modern plaster casting as a practice that grew out of medieval traditions and was adapted by the new humanistic concerns of the Renaissance, see Eckart Marchand’s chapter on “Plaster and Plaster Casts in Renaissance Italy,” in Plaster casts: making, collecting, and displaying from classical antiquity to the present, edited by Rune Frederiksen and Eckard Marchand. New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Marchand notes how plaster casts of human bodies and body parts were used as intermediate objects by painters and sculptors alike as substitutes for live models. See Mari Lending, Plaster Monuments (Princeton, 2017) for a wide-ranging look at nineteenth-century plaster casts as mass media before photography. For an example of this, see the cast courts at the V&A Museum. ↩︎

  10. Unlike lost wax casting, an indirect casting method preserves the original model by breaking the mold into pieces which can be removed from the pattern without destroying it. For an example of a plaster mold being made for a plaster cast, see the how-to video on plaster casting from the V&A Museum. ↩︎

  11. For a succinct discussion of intermediary materials, see Eckert Marchand, “Material distinctions: Plaster, Terracotta, and Wax in the Renaissance Artist’s Workshop,” in The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250-1750, ed. Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop and Pamela Smith (Manchester University Press, 2015). Marchand calls this ability to point to other materials the “indexicality” of plaster. He also suggests that plaster, as opposed to clay or wax, was understood “as the lowliest in the hierarchy of materials” (173). Plaster with polychromy, which was usually reserved for final objects and is therefore peripheral to this essay, represents an extreme example of this indexicality, insofar as the plaster object is made to imitate a real object in toto. At another extreme, this self-negating quality of plaster can produce highly abstract models that seem to be immaterial, such as the mathematical models developed in the nineteenth century to describe complex geometry. For a collection of photographs of these models, see Gerd Fischer, Mathematical Models: from the collections of Universities and Museums (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017). ↩︎

  12. This essay discusses the history of historical studies within schools of architecture and argues that a critical mode of historiography is needed alongside the productions of art, architecture, and history. He adds that “it is possible to envision an art or architectural practice as historiography!” (201) ↩︎