With a house-shaking crash, the dining-room plaster fell all at once.

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The ornate plaster ceiling of a room, designed to look like the interior of an imperial Chinese palace, was covered by multiple coats of paint, forming a deposit more than a centimeter thick.

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Voices travel up from the ground floor in a smokestack effect and ricochet around the preserved glazed-white brick walls. (The "new" library prefers buzz over the code of silence of the old library.) How different from the older sections of the library where, for instance, one reading room has restored its carved plaster ceiling reproducing Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence.

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When you opened that door, you were in the dining room, a place of giant flagstones and wormholed beams half buried in the plaster.

NEWYORKER: Hand on the Shoulder

Next door, Ms. Helfand, though known for her contemporary designs, restored and preserved ornamental plaster details in the ceilings, and saved old molding and etched glass pocket doors in the living room.

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The church smelled of candle wax and wet plaster, and most of the space had been sectioned off with scaffolds, leaving a high-ceilinged room the size of a small cellar.

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The New Amsterdam Room, originally the men's smoking retreat, is a marvelous elliptical space ringed with rotund plaster columns resembling gray Caen stone, and murals of New York from Dutch days to 1900.

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