By Jennifer C. Yates

Associated Press Writer

PITTSBURGH — Industrialist Andrew Carnegie wanted working-class people who couldn’t afford trips around the globe to be able to see the world’s architectural masterpieces.

So 100 years ago, Carnegie built a large hall and brought a church’s facade from France, intricately detailed doors from Italy, statuesque maidens from Greece, and dozens of other architectural masterpieces here. The casts were perfect reproductions, made of plaster.

This year, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Architecture is celebrating its centennial, and an exhibit focusing on the museum’s extensive and well-preserved cast collection is drawing attention to this once-popular art form.

“When people came to museums a hundred years ago, they came to see casts,” said Mattie M. Schloetzer, the exhibit’s organizer.

Over the years, those casts that were commonly bought from catalogs were replaced in museums by original works of art; many museums sold their casts, or destroyed them.

“The Carnegie’s timing was either very good or very bad. (Its cast collection was) assembled in 1907, just at the moment that originality was pouring forth,” said Franklin Toker, a University of Pittsburgh professor of the history of art and architecture who has studied the Carnegie’s cast collection. Instead of destroying its casts, the Carnegie kept its collection in the cavernous halls built especially to house them.

The collection is believed to be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, and the third largest in the world behind collections at museums in France and England.

The most dominating cast in the Carnegie’s Hall of Architecture is the large facade of the French Benedictine Abbey Church of St. Gilles from Gard, France, which measures nearly 40 feet high and about 78 feet wide. The facade features a center archway door — or portal — flanked by two smaller ones, and its plaster finish is a reddish brown.

Visitors can also view a replica of the Porch of the Maidens cast from the Acropolis. Towering overhead, some of the features on the maidens’ faces appear smashed or flattened.

At the real Acropolis in Greece, some of the maidens’ faces are completely worn off because of years of exposure to the weather, pollution and natural vibrations, Schloetzer said. That’s one thing that makes the Carnegie’s collection so significant, she said.

“These are copies yet they have more information, better information, than the original works do,” she said.

In one corner of the hall, capitals and columns of different styles from English Gothic to Italian Renaissance are displayed next to each other. A massive, intricately carved cast of the pulpit from Santa Croce in Florence, which dates to 1475, hangs from the wall.