MESDA’s architectural collection offer an extraordinary window into the wide-ranging architectural traditions of the early South which span MESDA’s geographic and chronological scope. MESDA’s founder, Frank L. Horton, collected many of the period rooms in the years before the museum opened, and others were added during subsequent expansions. While the installation of historic room interiors can be a powerful teaching tool, their removal and reinstallation in a museum poses a number of ethical and interpretive challenges. Frank L. Horton recognized these issues from the outset. When offered a room from an extant house by an antique dealer, Horton replied, “The woodwork is wonderful but I cannot conceive of removing same from such a house…. I hope that someone along the line will use better judgement [sic] than to strip this fine house of its integrity.” As he collected interiors through the 1950s for installation in MESDA he preferred to acquire a room only if it was a last means of preserving the space.

For museums, architectural collections raise innumerable questions. To what extent does the room reflect its original dimensions and organization? How much of the architecture is original? To what extent are the architectural finishes, including paint schemes, original or accurately recreated? How did the room fit into a planned series of spaces? Do the other objects in the room - the furniture, textiles, ceramics, paintings - help us to better understand the architecture as an object in its own right?  Who had access to this space and who did not? These are but a few of the questions that continue to animate these objects - by far the largest objects in the museum - that represent the richest array of architectural interiors from the early American South in a museum collection.

Adapted from “Architecture as Artifact: Period Rooms in the MESDA Collection” in The Magazine Antiques (1/2007) article by Louis P. Nelson, Professor of Architecture, Chair of Architectural History, University of Virginia.