Fall 2007
The Grandeur of the Qing
Our site on the Southern Inspection Tour Scrolls of the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors was recently discussed on metafilter.com, one of the earliest community weblogs. Metafilter is a VMC favorite, so we were quite flattered to make it on.
Mapping Gothic France
The Trustees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have recently approved a major award to support a web-borne database project entitled Mapping Gothic France, to be developed within the framework of a collaboration between the Visual Media Center in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University Libraries, and Vassar College.
Whereas pictures can be represented in two-dimensional digital images conveyed on the computer screen as thumb-nail or full-screen images, buildings demand a different mode of representation. Mapping Gothic France builds upon a theoretical framework derived from Henri Lefèbvre (The Production of Space) that seeks to establish linkages between the architectural space of individual buildings; the complex spaces of cities; geo-political space, and the social space resulting from the interaction (collaboration and conflict) between multiple agents: builders and users. We will establish a map of northern France, locating the major cathedrals and monasteries constructed between the mid-twelfth and mid-thirteenth centuries. The user will be able to move the cursor over the map and each building will identify itself with a short text and images that present themselves in a way that corresponds to the experience of the visitor. The spatial character of the edifice will be conveyed in spherical panoramic virtual reality nodes and three-dimensional models. All plans and sections will be rendered on the same scale, so that the plan of the Amiens choir, for example, can be superimposed upon the plan of the Beauvais choir. Just as in our previous web-based mapping project (www.learn.columbia.edu/bourb/php) the user will be given tools to facilitate a comparative study of the shapes and dimensions of buildings.
Our task is not just to develop a more appropriate way of representing the spaciousness of individual monuments, but to provide the user with new ways to understand the relationship of hundreds of buildings conventionally described as “Gothic.” This phenomenon is understood in terms of sameness and difference found in the forms of multiple buildings within a defined period of time and space that corresponds to the emergence of France as a nation state. The telling of the story of France tends to project the illusion of manifest destiny with the apparently inevitable development of “Gothic” seen as the visual corollary. Mapping Gothic France will employ animated maps to correlate the architectural and geo-political dimensions of the emergence of the nation state.
The project will be led by Stephen Murray, Professor or Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and founder of the Media Center, and Andrew Tallon, who graduated from the Columbia Department of Art History and Archaeology in 2007 and is now assistant professor at Vassar College.
Winter/Spring 2007
Robert Moses & the Modern City
The Wallach Art Gallery is joining with two New York City institutions to present a three-part exhibition titled Robert Moses and the Modern City. Coinciding with the section Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution at the Wallach are Remaking the Metropolis at the Museum of the City of New York and The Road to Recreation at the Queens Museum of Art. The curator of all three exhibitions is Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian and a professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology.
In addition to our work on the Wallach's website, the VMC has designed an online resource for the three venue program. Based on our work with Professor Ballon's professor seminar, the site includes and interactive map of the works of Robert Moses in New York City, an extensive collection of photographs, and text on each exhbition.
Fall 2006
VMC collaboration with ARTstor
ARTstor and Columbia University are pleased to announce a collaboration intended to encourage the use of Quick Time Virtual Reality (QTVR) panoramas of world architecture in teaching, learning and scholarship.
The Visual Media Center at Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology has taken a lead role in developing QTVR documents of world architecture. Through a recent agreement, Columbia will work with ARTstor to distribute several hundred of these documents for educational and scholarly use as part of the ARTstor Digital Library. QTVR enables faculty and students to complement traditional side-by-side image comparisons with a mode of representation based on space and context. The VMC has documented monuments and sites including such antique sites as the Pantheon and Domus Aurea in Rome (Nero’s “Golden House”), Early Christian and Byzantine sites such as Galla Placidia, the Orthodox Baptistry, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, San Vitale in Ravenna and Hosios Lukas in Greece; Islamic sites including the Hagia Sophia; Medieval cathedrals from Amiens to York; numerous Renaissance and Baroque architectural monuments; and important 19th and 20th century sites including the Paris Opera, Le Corbusier’s Church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Public Library, and many others. At the same time, ARTstor is pleased to be sponsoring an upcoming Columbia QTVR campaign in Venice, Italy, which will produce panoramas of a range of historically significant sites from various eras in the city’s storied history. This project will be conducted under the aegis of the Columbia University Center for Study in Venice at Casa Muraro.
Acting as Field Director for the Columbia QTVR campaigns, medieval art historian Andrew Tallon has, over the past six years, photographed more than two thousand 360° spherical QTVR nodes of some of the greatest monuments of European architecture – at present the largest such collection in existence – which he and his colleagues use for both teaching and research. Speaking as both an informed practitioner and a scholar and teacher, Tallon observes that "QTVR represents a huge advance over the traditional slide. It allows both teacher and student to experience architectural space in ways that were not possible before. Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, for example, is both difficult to access and defies two-dimensional representation; but with QTVR it can be brought directly into the classroom. Similarly, he entire sculptural program of the central portal of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris can be explored from a single interface, with the user zooming in to see details as desired.” Max Marmor, ARTstor’s Director of Collection Development, expresses ARTstor’s enthusiasm for this partnership. “We are delighted to be working with our friends at Columbia both to extend the reach of their pioneering work with QTVR and to help ensure that this work can continue. We are convinced that QTVR and related technologies have the potential to transform the study and teaching of architectural history and other related subjects, and believe there is an important role for ARTstor in advancing this effort.”
The first fruits of this collaboration should be available to ARTstor users early in 2007, but you can access these materials at the History of Architecture site.
History of Architecture | ARTstor
Spring 2004
Images and QTVR from Bam, Iran
View a collection of images and QTVR nodes from Bam, Iran taken before and after the earthquake of 2003.
www.learn.columbia.edu/bam
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