Introduction

A World of Fragile Parts explored threats facing global heritage sites and how the production of copies can aid in the preservation of cultural artefacts by engaging the long curatorial history of casts, copies and replicas. Its central focus was the ‘copy’: the first section surveyed the history of art and architectural copies with a display of plaster casts and related objects from the V&A’s Cast Courts; and the second presented a ‘twenty-first century cast court’ consisting of objects that used digital technologies for heritage copying. 13 contemporary practitioners were invited to take part in this reimagined cast court, including Smout Allen.

The exhibition’s motivating question was: What is the role and function of digital copies today? The historical survey established that the Cast Court collections were intended for educational or exhibition purposes, not in the main to preserve. The plaster copy was the nineteenth century’s ‘mass-medium for dissemination’, exchanged amongst cultural institutions for the improvement of knowledge, and largely untroubled by the questions of authenticity that influence our contemporary appreciation of replica objects (Lending 2018). Yet, over time, the value of the V&A’s copies has shifted as many plaster casts have outlived their originals: the best known example is the full-scale brick and plaster replica of Trajan’s Column (1864), which is now more ‘perfect’ than its Roman original (AD 107–113) that has been severely degraded due to acid rain wash erosion (V&A 2017). Thus, the V&A copies now act as critical backups for their historical originals and are important for preservation efforts.

4 Erecting the cast of Trajan’s Column, c.1873.

5 Robin Hood Gardens, 1972. The central communal garden showing the large mound built on rubble from the demolished Victorian terraces that the estate replaced.

6 Robin Hood Gardens, 1972. ‘Streets in the sky’.

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Digital technologies, such as ultra hi-resolution imagery, digital scanning, 3D printing and virtual reality are the contemporary processes used in the recording and reproduction of artefacts, paralleling the use of plaster casting, electroplating and photography in the 1850s. These new techniques allow for more detailed recording and analysis of in-situ objects, which thanks to advances in technology and connectivity can then be circulated through digital databases. Rather than being displaced to the museum gallery, digital copies can now be ‘dematerialised’ to the hard drive, prompting the question that underlay the twenty-first-century cast court: What are the alternative futures for the museum and its immaterial artefacts? As the curator of the exhibition – the V&A’s Brendan Cormier – made clear, the intention of this section was to go beyond preservation to explore how digital copies can perpetuate material culture and add an additional dimension to its understanding (Cormier and Thom 2016, p. 21).

Smout Allen’s contribution, Infractus: the Taking of Robin Hood Gardens, used LiDAR scan data to record architectural elements of Robin Hood Gardens (RHG), a housing estate designed in 1972 by Alison and Peter Smithson in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. When we came to the site, it was in a precarious state of dereliction and semiabandonment. Rather than attempting to create a pristine record of RHG’s architecture, we instead scanned six places where traces of inhabitants’ lives were visible or vandalism and decay was evident (the title, Infractus, is taken from the Latin meaning ‘broken, weakened or impaired’). The data was then given form using 3D crystal laser etching to create six sets of four glass blocks. Each set rematerialises one point-cloud 3D image.

7 LiDAR scanner and tripod recording in an abandoned kitchen at Robin Hood Gardens.

8 LiDAR scan of a kitchen in the abandoned east block.

In order to gather photographic and scan material, we obtained access to deserted flats in both the east and west wings of RHG, which had been stripped of any fittings worthy of salvage. Working with what remained, we sought out three types of place for scanning: first, places that spoke to neglect in the management and maintenance of the site: broken windows, peeling paint, security grills and secondary glazing; second, architectural details that the Smithson’s believed would create community and belonging, testifying to the initial optimism of the design, such as kitchens overlooking the central communal garden or windows on street decks (‘streets in the sky’); and third, traces of the lives of RHG’s (often unwillingly) evicted inhabitants: fixtures and fittings such as kitchen tiles, net curtains, carpets, soft toys and DIY repairs.

These scanned moments were then rematerialised in six laser-etched crystal models – a process normally used for the creation of cheap mass-produced souvenirs. This medium was chosen for historical reasons – tipping our hat to the plaster cast souvenirs popular in the nineteenth century – as well as to acknowledge that an act of material translation had taken place. In the movement from the Brutalist concrete of RHG to the more delicate reproduction, the imperfections and fragility of the digital copy itself are highlighted.

Other exhibitors in A World of Fragile Parts included Sam Jacob Studio, who created a full-sized replica of a refugee shelter from the Calais Jungle; The Institute for Digital Archaeology, who recreated the Palmyra Arch of Triumph, which was destroyed by Islamic State in 2015; and Forensic Architecture and their Bomb Cloud Atlas that modelled and 3D printed four plume clouds from various Middle Eastern conflicts. Taken together, the artists and architects who contributed to the twenty-first-century cast court did not provide any singular perspective on preservation. Rather, they opened up critical questions about the role and potential of digital copying in a world in which material and cultural heritage is under increasing threat, whether through war, climate change or market-led demolitions.

9 A World of Fragile Parts, La Biennale di Venezia, 15th International Architecture Exhibition, 2016.

10–2 (overleaf) Infractus: The Taking of Robin Hood Gardens.