The room has white plaster walls with large ancient pieces of dark wood.

VOA: special.2010.08.04

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

NEWYORKER: Idols

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.

WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand

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.

WSJ: The Library's Future Is Not an Open Book | By Julie V. Iovine | Public Library Renovation