ATDTDA (2): "staff" (46.8)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Lew slid like a snake from one architectural falsehood to the next, his working suits by the end of each day smudged white from rubbing against so much "staff," a mixture of plaster and hemp fibers, ubiquitous at the White City that season, meant to counterfeit some deathless white stone (p. 46).

 

Here, the Pynchonwiki comes in handy:
 
The Museum of Science and Industry, one of "The Seven Wonders of Chicago," preserves the last vestiges of Chicago's legendary 1893 Columbian Exposition. Its history is a soap opera of pride, peril and redemption.
The "City of Big Shoulders" was a fierce competitor in the battle to host the United State's 1893 Exposition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of "Columbus' Discovery of the New World." Chicago and its own local barons beat out New York, Washington, D.C., and others. 

The team transformed a swamp seven miles south of Chicago's Loop, into the famed "White City." They drained and sculpted land, created canals, lagoons and fountains. Famous architects, primarily from the East Coast (locals such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright felt somewhat snubbed), designed buildings constructed of easily molded "staff," a mix of plaster and hemp fiber. Chicagoans turned to landscape experts Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to create a garden intended to outlive the Exposition and rival New York's Central Park. And project architect and planner Daniel H. Burnham became famous for his Chicago plan and the phrase, "Make no little plans." 

The "White City's" color was not by design, but from necessity. The staff was expected to be colorfully painted and embellished, but this method proved unequal to Chicago's harsh lakefront weather. Months of experimentation lead to the invention of the world's first large-scale airless paint sprayer. A team of four workers cruised the grounds blasting barrels of white, lead, oil paint, "refreshing" every building in sight. [...]

http://www.buildingstonemagazine.com/summer-06/historic.html

http://ftp.apci.net/~truax/1904wf/WF_Mem-Staff.htm


Staff is a kind of artificial stone used for covering and ornamenting buildings. It is made chiefly of powdered gypsum or plaster of Paris, with a little cement, glycerin, and dextrin, mixed with water until it is about as thick as molasses, when it may be cast in molds into any shape. To strengthen it coarse cloth or bagging, or fibers of hemp or jute, are put into the molds before casting. It becomes hard enough in about a half hour to be removed and fastened on the building in construction. Staff may easily be bent, sawed, bored, or nailed. Its natural color is murky white, but it may be made to resemble any kind of stone.

Staff was invented in France about 1876 and was used in the construction and ornamentation of the buildings of the Paris Expositions of 1878 and of 1889. It was also largely used in the construction of the buildings of the Columbian Exhibition at Chicago in 1893, at the Omaha and Buffalo Expositions in 1898 and 1901, and at later expositions and on temporary buildings of other kinds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_(building_material)



This brief passage further enhances the reality/illusion motif established with the introduction of Lew on p. 36.