UTSOAThe University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture

Archive for the ‘architectural history’ Category

Centre des Monuments Nationaux

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The Centre des Monuments Nationaux conserves, restores, and manages nearly 100 national monuments, opening up these sites of social, cultural, and architectural history for public consumption. The website uses a geographic search feature to locate pages devoted to the Pantheon, Tours Cathedral, the house of George Sand, and many more. Monument pages include photographs and videos, points of historical interests, details about tours and other activities on site, and a list of literature specific to the building.

Two Million Images on Bildindex

Bildindex

Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur consists of around 2 million images of art and architecture located in Germany and throughout Europe. While Bildindex is a German-language site, it is navigable for the English speaker through interactive features that  provide information about the current location and history of the image object. The product of over 30 years of collection development, Bildindex hosts a wide range of image types (drawings, photographs, paintings, prints, plans) as well as special collections and continues to grow by sponsoring further digitization projects.

Inmagine the Difference

Inmagine

Inmagine is the world’s largest royalty-free stock photography site with over 3.5 million images from over 100 best-selling collections. With images organized into galleries and categories, they are easy to search even without using Inmagines innovative search tools including Insight keyword search and Universal Search, a mechanism using geography and language detection to locate images. In addition, Inmagine offers a number of services including image enlargement and retouching.

Phantom City Considers Alternative Futures for New York

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While many use iPhones to navigate cities or find a good restaurant, a new app has attempted to use the same technology to enrich the urban experience and uncover unrealized layers of the landscape. Museum of the Phantom City is a public art project designed by Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York City and Philadelphia. The Phantom City transforms NYC into a living museum and maps 50 unrealized projects onto the current urban grid. The beta version of the app is available for free and you can also view the entire tour on their website.

Read more about the project on BldgBlog

Phase III: Moving Preservation Forward

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Smallen House, 1957

The Philip Johnson Glass House and the State of Connecticut announced Phase III in their efforts to move modern preservation forward with the launch of the new documentary film Living Modern in Connecticut. Living Modern examines modern architecture in Connecticut including the work of Saarinan and Breuer asking if this architecture is danger of disappearing. The film premiers on CPTV Thursday, November 12th.

In addition, The Philip Johnson Glass House is teaming with the State and number of other local and regional civic and preservation organizations to create a the Multiple Property Documentation Form. The Multiple Property Documentation Form will further the work of the 2008 Modern Homes Survey by facilitating the effort to identify and preserve modern homes in Connecticut in addition to providing registry with the National Register of Historic Places.

The Berlin Wall: Twenty Years After

Yesterday celebrated the 20th anniversary of the symbolic collapse of European communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall continues to impact the process of historical meaning-making trough the creation of new social identities as the east and west work to reconcile 40 years of difference. This history has been chronicled in a number of scholarly publications, while museums, exhibits and online archives have been dedicated to collecting and preserving objects and artifacts, news material, and personal testimony. Below you will find a few resources that ground this momentous event in the context of the past, present and future.

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German Mssions in the United States has created a webpage devoted to Looking Back at the Fall of the Berlin Wall. This site incorporates a timeline, articles, images and videos that examine the tandem histories of the GDR and Federal Republic, Cold War history in the U. S., and comparative pictographic history of the life of the wall before and after the Wende. In addition, the Berlin Wall Image Gallery couples with a number of other links to offer a broad range of resources on the Wall.

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A respository for virtual exhibitions examining the period of the Cold War, the Cold War Museum has created an exhibit devoted to the history of the Berlin Wall. The exhibit includes photographs by Official US Army Photographer, Hugh Palmer, and are merely one component in a larger visual history of the Cold War preserved by this virtual museum.

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The Newseum celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a gallery exhibit that immerses the visitor in the history of the fall with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits. The Berlin Wall exhibit features eight 12-foot-high concrete sections of wall and a guard tower, and focuses on the permeability of the wall highlighting the role of radio and television broadcasts in creating an awareness of western politics and culture in East Germany.


Toward the Sentient City

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The Exhibit, Toward the Sentient City, curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York, has an admirable online presence. The exhibit investigates how ubiquitous computing and ambient technology have come to influence architecture and urban design. Shepard writes:

“We are now on the cusp of a similarly fundamental reconfiguration of physical space, one in which a vast and mostly invisible layer of technology is being embedded into the world around us. Using a wide range of complex technologies and devices — from microprocessors and electronic identification tags to sensors and networked information systems — buildings and cities are being transformed, imbued with the capacity to sense, record, process, transmit, and respond to information and activity taking place within and around them.”  Read more here.

German History in Documents and Images

GDHI

German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of original historical materials documenting German history in ten historic periods ranging from the early modern period to the present. Each section includes an introduction to key historical developments as well as a selection of primary source documents (in German and English), images and relevant maps. All of the materials can be accessed through keyword and author searches. Advanced options also allow searches to be limited and refined.

Arounder: A Panoramic City Tour

arounder

Travel site Arounder uses Google maps to organize interactive, panoramic exhibits of a number of European cities and a few American sites. For each location listed on Arounder, a number of panoramic views are available including views of church interiors, city streets, public plazas, and natural or manufactured landscapes.

The Ashmolean Enters the 21st Century

Ashmolean

On November 7th, the Ashmolean will reopen after a £61 million redevelopment. Adding 39 new galleries, this renovation focuses on integrating new ways of seeing the past into both the fabric of the building and the experience it enfolds. Architect Rick Mather worked with the museum to create a space that facilitated not only the enjoyment of objects on display but also new and broader understandings of their historical meaning.

For more information read this Gaurdian article.