ABSTRACT
Buildings are of course only very large artefacts, and the relocation of artefacts has long been recognized as problematic. Moving buildings is still very much a minority sport, with few groups and fewer individuals prepared to take the requisite time and effort. It seems to have been in the nineteenth century that buildings were first moved in any systematic way. As the world became smaller with the arrival of the railways, the telegraph, and the rise of a new imperial order, certain buildings started to take on novel roles that both challenged and sustained this new order. Imperial expositions were equally keen to present the past through the presentation of dioramas recreating times before, during and after the advent of civilization. The traditional world-in-miniature open-air museum moves buildings not to highlight mobility and social change but to draw visitor's attention to a more stable world before modernization.
