Don’t Tell Me How to Have a Good Time explores how the replication of architecture can shape the historical meanings of the original rather than serving as a neutral archive. The project is based on a nineteenth-century plaster cast of a window frame from the Certosa di Pavia, in Pavia, Italy, currently displayed in the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum. By tracing the object’s movement from sacred architecture to secular museum display, it is revealed how meaning is continually rewritten through acts of replication, omission, and institutional framing.

Window Frame, now displayed at the V&A, was cast by Pietro Pierotti in 1867. This act transformed a sacred European monument into an instructional model within an imperial museum context. The cast visually preserves the decorative marble frame. However, it omits the glass panes entirely. This omission highlights that architectural meaning is created through social and institutional priorities, rather than simply being inherited.

Rather than simply reproducing decoration, the project highlights absence to demonstrate that meaning is constructed through what is left out as much as what is kept. By casting the glass panes as abstract forms, the work turns divine transparency into tangible opacity, underscoring the active role of exclusion in shaping historical narrative. Don’t Tell Me How to Have a Good Time challenges the idea that replicas restore wholeness or accurately expand knowledge of history. In this light, casting is not used as representation, but as a critical medium. It exposes how architectural history is continually framed and rewritten through the systems that claim to preserve it.