The Great Hall Ceiling

2001-2002

In 2001, Frank Matero, chairman of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and director of the Architectural Conservation Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, coordinated the repair of the Drayton Hall's mid 19th-century cast-plaster ceiling. The goal was to reattach sections of historic plaster that were no longer securely fastened to the lath and in danger of falling.

Matero's team began by "mapping" the ceiling — its curvature, the location and sizes of cracks, and the extent of plaster damage — with GIS technology, a technology most often used by planning departments and geographers to map land areas. With a comprehensive map in hand, Matero built a model designed to help predict future failures so that conservators could repair current problems and shore up areas that might fail down the road.

During the project, conservators laid out a number of plaster fragments that had fallen from an area right above the hearth that had never been properly keyed in place and attached them back to the ceiling using an acrylic emulsion.

To conserve areas of the ceiling that were loose but not detached — those in danger of failing in the future — they drilled a series of small holes along the existing cracks into which they injected consilidant with huge syringes — the size typically used in veterinary care for horses.

Matero's techniques were so successful that the Association for Preservation Technology bestowed their "Best Article" award upon Matero for a 2006 paper discussing the ceiling conservation.