By MARTY LEVINE
Michael Walter’s office in the Cathedral of Learning is under a staircase in the first-floor Commons Room, and as fancy as the large double oak doors look, its location screams “storage closet.”
And that’s also correct. Inside, Walter — manager of education programs for the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Program — sits amid all the objects that will not fit into the Nationality Rooms’ main storage room in the Cathedral basement, nor into the costume room just above his head.
There are cases of Hummel figurines intended for the German room, stacks of publications for the Yugoslav room, and two large wooden heads for the African Heritage Room — rooms themselves already full of objects on display and in use. Here, among the overflow, are books, souvenir items and musical instruments galore.
Walter has counted more than 700 items kept for possible later use in the Nationality Rooms, and another 700-plus costumes.
Some of the Nationality Rooms were built without display cases. Some display cases are never changed; others are switched seasonally, such as the Japanese room’s collection. That’s all up to the room committees who originally planned, raised money for and built these rooms, starting 100 years ago. On this, the program’s centennial year, most rooms have long ago been finished and filled.
The earliest object in storage is a Lithuanian zither, Walter says. This, the African carvings, and other stored pieces “are also wonderful objects to take on the road,” he notes, when he gives talks to schools, retirement centers and elsewhere.
“I actually dissuade people and also refuse new donations because we don't have the storage space anymore,” he adds.
Maintenance and restoration of the rooms goes on continually — but must be carefully timed. The rooms are working classrooms, especially in the fall and spring, and of course they host tours and individual tourists throughout the year. The floors and chairs therefore get the most wear. All of the rooms have chairs built in the year the room originated (although their design may represent another era), and so their materials “reflect what is acceptable at its time,” Walter explains.
It's therefore certain that these rooms will need to be restored, and individual objects repaired or even reproduced: “It's inevitable that things will crack or get dirty or wear out. Facilities Management will just keep fixing them.
But they can’t always do so. Yes, they sanded and refinished the Polish and Russian room floors this past summer; the Austrian and Lithuanian rooms are scheduled for the same treatments during semester breaks.
But there are special cases that require an artist or an art restoration company.
The Lithuanian room, originally built and decorated in 1940, contains a wall painting by then-Professor of Fine Arts Phillip Elliott, who reproduced a well-known Lithuanian work. This wall painting began to deteriorate within a few years, with colors changing and flaking. Elliott, who had moved on to Buffalo, returned to try repairing the piece, but finally recommended its replacement. Eventually that task fell to the Nationality Rooms’ then-Director Maxine Bruhns, who recruited local artist Leora Closky to redo the painting on canvas and affixed it atop the original — the first known instance of a Nationality Room replacement.
Since then, the intarsia in the Czechoslovak room — a design using different wood types for varied color and texture, inlaid like a jigsaw puzzle — has been restored by professional art restorers. The Polish room’s ceiling paint, done authentically with egg tempura made from egg yolks, has also been redone, to once again reflect the style of Polish Renaissance kings from the Wawel castle in Krakow.
“The preference for how people are taught in the rooms has also changed,” Walter notes, prompting room committees to add audio-visual technology for computers, PowerPoint presentations and films — or simply some left-handed desks (the ones that have a roughly L-shaped writing surface jutting from one side), since only right-handed desks were put in place in the Nationality Rooms through the 1950s.
More recently built Nationality Rooms have incorporated technology, and air conditioning, such as the Swiss room. The Welsh room became compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2008, with aisles wide enough for wheelchairs.
The Greek room has accommodated technology more recently, adding a tech console whose design duplicates some of the ornate furniture already in place, painted with beeswax and dry pigments. Walter says he is pleased that the value of traditional craftsmanship, and each room’s ties to its country, are maintained.
Costumes from another era — for people of another size
From 1944 until just a few years ago, guides in costume — from what was at first the all-female Quo Vadis student club — gave tours of the rooms near the December holidays. While the Holiday Open House continues, today these costumes are arrayed in a new storage room above Walter’s office. The room has no museum-quality climate control, but the costumes were recently re-hung, boxed and catalogued.
Walter unsheaths costumes to display a Czech shawl, a Romanian shepherd’s vest, a German man’s suit. Most are for women, and many have embroidery; some also have headdresses or jewelry, stored separately. A majority of the costumes look like they were designed for short, very slim persons. “I have never had a guy small enough to wear it,” he says of the grey Teutonic tailoring.
The last stop on the storage tour — which skipped the separate space full of Nationality Room committees’ December holiday decorations — is a crowded basement room. It houses some holiday overflow (the Italian room nativity scene, for one) but mostly boxes and metal cases with their treasures hidden. Walter assures that within the cardboard and cabinets lay more country-specific publications, more musical instruments and even “extra jars of soil from Ireland” that could not be built into the original Irish room.
Some of the stored items are resting on the concrete bases of the seismographs that were placed here before the building opened. They once measured the shaking of the earth for miles around. The bases were put in even before the floor was poured, Walter says — anchored to the earth.
What is it like to be one of the people in charge of the most picturesque and the least picturesque parts of the Cathedral, Walter was asked. “Well,” he says, “behind every well-designed facade is a bunch of chaos.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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