Museum as study subject
A century ago this July, construction began on a new building for Harvard’s Germanic Museum. It was to be housed in Adolphus Busch Hall, named after the main donor, a St. Louis beer baron. In one way, the museum’s venue on Kirkland Street arrived at a good time. Since 1903, its collection of monumental plaster casts — then America’s most impressive representations of medieval sculpture from northern and central Europe — had languished in cramped Rogers Hall, a former gymnasium. In another way, it came at a very bad time. Less than a month after construction started, so did World War I, sending a tsunami of anti-German sentiment across America. Busch Hall was finished in 1917, and the casts were moved in. But the Germanic Museum’s new venue did not officially open until 1921, purportedly delayed by a lack of coal. (“The odium that attaches to it will, of course, wear off...