Timeline of Select Projects | Index of Projects

Since its inception, the Media Center has engaged in numerous photography campaigns, visiting essential sites from the global history of art and architecture and producing thousands of panoramic nodes. Here we present a small sample from our portfolio, placing the panoramas in context by mapping them to architectural plans.

Simple Flash animation of generic floorplans showing the evolution of European religious architecture

Stitched photographs of cave wall murals with image detail hotspots

Flash-based monograph containing panoramas, images, videos, and diagrams of various rooms of the Alhambra complex in Granada, Spain

Interactive floorplan and elevation diagrams that allow students to learn and test themselves on Gothic architectural terms

Monograph on Amiens Cathedral featuring photographs, drawings and plans, 3D renderings, and texts.

In support of the exploration of the intersection of humanities disciplines, the Media Center has augmented our virtual reality tour of Amiens to include a choral performance captured from multiple locations in the cathedral.

Media Center staff and interns accompanied the Spring 2012 Undergraduate Travel Seminar to Rome to document monuments of Ancient Roman and Early Christian architecture.

Late Media Center Director Caleb Smith photographed this rich collection of temple architecture from the Khmer Empire in Angkor, present-day Cambodia.

Unfinished archaeological database containing data from Professor Clemente Marconi's Ancient Selinus excavation

This collection of photographs of government-sponsored architecture in Pyongyang, the Demilitarized Zone, and other sites of interest was taken by Columbia Art History student Lorenzo Vigotti.

This architecture mapping database was the predecessor to Art Atlas

This website presents a collection of photographs, panoramas, and aerial views of The Citadel of Bam (Arg-e Bam), Iran taken in 2003 and 2004, before and after a large earthquake devastated most of the medieval city.

In coordination with Prof. Michael Cole's Spanish Italy & the Iberian Americas project, the Media Center was able to join the research group on a trip to the Puglia region of southern Italy.

This companion site to Art Humanities serves as a repository for instructor resources and briefings.

Lead by Prof. Barry Bergdoll, the Fall 2019 Travel Seminar gave the Media Center the opportunity to document significant Bauhaus sites during the centennial.

Annotated details of Breugel's painting

Image of the painting and details

Image of the painting and details

Image of the painting and details

The Art History Teaching Collection, compiled by the Media Center for Art History from scans of slides and photographs, is accessible to anyone on Columbia's campus or with a Columbia University UNI.

This project aimed "to create new computational tools" for for studying historic structures and archaeological sites, then to compile the data into a database and educational website. Featured locations include Amheida, Egypt; Monte Polizzo, Italy; Thulamela, South Africa; Beauvais Cathedral, France; and St. John the Divine, New York City.

Timed Flash animation of architectural terminology

Delight in Design was created as an online resource for an exhibition of South Asian silver at the Wallach Gallery in 2008, curated by Vidya Dehejia, Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art.

Animation showing successive iterations of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome through comparison of groundplans

During an Artstor-sponsored fieldwork campaign in May 2010, the Media Center documented significant architectural sites in Japan from the 8th to 21st centuries and gained unparalleled access to some of the nation's most famous monuments.

Overlaid floorplans comparing the architecture of Durham Cathedral and the old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome

Black-and-white photographs of Durham Cathedral plotted in a building floorplan

Interactive timeline of masterworks of Chinese painting 900-1750 CE. Users can compare multiple works along the timeline or view individual pieces in detail, including four long scroll paintings.

Flash-based virtual tour of The Kaufmann House, commonly known as Fallingwater, featuring panoramas mapped onto a plan of the house and grounds

Scans of thirteen of Goya's Disasters of War prints with captions, organized as a slideshow

Animation of the rock inscriptions on Great Vista Peak disappearing in reverse chronological order of creation to reveal the mountain face as it likely appeared pre-inscriptions

This History of Architecture Web site is designed to support undergraduate education by focusing on interactive panoramas as a method of expanding the options for classroom presentations of architectural subjects.

This was the first iteration of the Istanbul Documentation Project.

The Istanbul Documentation Project aims to create a digital platform for the virtual presentation of Istanbul's Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and early Republican sites and monuments and thus provides a rich resource for scholars, students, and the general public.

Digitized, stitched images of Chinese scroll paintings with annotations and translations. One of four digitized. Also part of the Exploring Chinese Painting site.

Digitized, stitched images of Chinese scroll paintings with annotations and translations. One of four digitized. Also part of the Exploring Chinese Painting site.

This website demonstrates how Le Corbusier's Five Points of New Architecture are deployed in his Villa Savoye, and primarily features panoramas plotted on floorplans.

Before Artstor, Luna hosted the Art History Teaching Collection images.

An unfinished website on the growth of Naples from the Classical Era to the Renaissance, with historical maps and paintings and a brief history of the city.

This comprehensive database of Gothic monuments in France contains more than twenty thousand original photographs and panoramas, accompanied by contextual materials, including historical texts, timelines, and interactive maps.

This digital learning environment offers students the opportunity to engage the art and architecture of Renaissance Venice, seen through the famous view of the city by Jacopo de'Barbari, a monumental woodblock print dated 1500.

The Media Center Image Database (MCID) hosts the Department of Art History's teaching collections, special collections, and original photography of globally significant art and architecture. Fieldwork highlights include Istanbul, Iraq, Rome, Chicago, The American Southwest, and Japan.

With over 110,000 new individual images added to MCID in the last couple years from digitization projects alone, MCID's reliance on collections as a primary organizational focus hinders findability of these important new resources. The Media Center has initiated an MCID restructuring project, designed to build connections across collections and increase findability of media of all types. This project is still in process and will be announced formally when available.

Collection of academic texts, primary and secondary sources, historical images, floorplans, and panoramas on a variety of Medieval Architectural styles.

Early course monograph created for a class and Metropolitan Museum exhibit of the same name.

Before MCID, Mnemosyne was the Media Center's database for hosting all its image resources.

Highlights in this photographic survey of late-19th and 20th-century architecture in Chicago, IL include iconic structures by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, and Rem Koolhaas, plus the Museum of Science and Industry, the last remaining building from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Scans of 26 of Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings, viewable in color or monochrome. The site also has a sun wheel feature that organizes ten of the paintings by approximate time of day they were made.

Flash animations of floorplan and elevation.

Floorplan with plotted, rollover elevation diagrams.

Black-and-white historical images of Notre-Dame plotted on a building floorplan

Annotated floorplans and images of the Parthenon frieze, organized by facade.

Digitized, stitched images of Chinese scroll paintings with annotations and translations. One of four digitized. Also part of the Exploring Chinese Painting site.

Digitized, stitched images of Chinese scroll paintings with annotations and translations. One of four digitized. Also part of the Exploring Chinese Painting site.

Video of late Professor David Rosand describing Raphael's fresco with computer-animated illustrations.

Video of late Professor David Rosand describing Raphael's fresco with computer-animated illustrations.

This website devoted to the Stanza della Segnatura in contains images, details, descriptions, and explanations of the iconography and techniques for each of Raphael's frescoes.

These monumental scrolls, commissioned by the Kangxi and Quinlong Emperors of the Qing Dynasty to record their multiple inspection tours, provide a unique and vivid glimpse into the grandeur of late imperial China and are the focus of this web site. The site has been updated to a new version by Asia for Educators

Focusing on the late-1940s restoration of the Kariye Camii, a Byzantine-era church in Istanbul, the website contains current photographs, historical phographs, panoramas, 3D models and animations, floorplans, academic texts, a glossary, a bibliography, and useful links.

This photographic survey features just some of India's more than 1,500 rock cut structures, ancient and medieval buildings that represent amazing achievements of structural engineering and craftmanship.

The Media Center was able to join the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean Annual Graduate Tour and document sites of Roman and Early Christian Germany lead by Prof. Holger A. Klein and Prof. Francesco de Angelis.

This web resource presents unique research, chronicling the documentation of over thirty Romanesque structures through comprehensive digital photography and three-dimensional panoramas.

Website documenting the 2006-07 excavation of the acropolis at the Ancient Greek colony of Selinus in modern-day Sicily, with very detailed aerial map of the site.

This site features a high-resolution, zoomable image of the "Feast of Sadah" page of this 16th-century Iranian illuminated manuscript, along with descriptions of the iconography, history, and historical figures found therein.

Two Columbia University graduate students, Rebecca Fitle and Amanda Gannaway, took these images of important archaeological and cultural heritage sites in Bolivia and Peru.

Using a Flash-based map with cultural site, cities, elevation, languages, population, etc. overlays, this site highlights important architectural sites in the India subcontinent. Each site contains floorplans, a description and history of the site, and links to image portfolios and panoramas.

Created by the late Media Center director James Conlon, this website primarily contains information and data about the conservation of ornate mud-architecture houses in Tarim, Yemen, along with a collection of original photographs and panoramas.

An image database for the "Tarim: Community and the Built Environment in Yemen" website.

Photographed in New Mexico and Arizona, this collection features a range of art and architecture, from pre-Columbian Native American settlements and Spanish Colonial mission churches to Modern Navajo architecture and contemporary Southwestern art.

This teaching module showcases Media Center projects and image collections relating to Middle, South, and East Asian art and architecture in order to better serve the faculty and students of Columbia University.

Website documenting the excavation and restoration of Hagia Sophia, Vize, through texts, images, and floorplans.

Images and panoramas of this Neo-Gothic New York church plotted on a floorplan.

Created by late Media Center Director James Conlon following the Terra 2008 conference in Bamako, Mali, this site features panoramas and images of this classic African Islamic mud monument dating from 1935. There is also a brief history and bibliography of the region and building.

Part of the "Computational Tools for Modeling, Visualizing and Analyzing Historic and Archaeological Sites" project, "Thulamela" is the most completed subproject with its own separate website.

The Media Center produced the digital monograph for the 2010-11 exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the British Museum.

Featuring still images, rotational object photography, and curator's texts, this Media Center site was built to serve as a digital catalog for an exhibit of Chinese sculpture from Dr. Arthur M. Sackler's large donation of Asian artworks to Columbia University.

This site contains information on Picasso's seminal work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, including essays, prepatory drawings, and biographical information on the artist. All images can be compared against the final painting in the image viewer.

In 2007, ARTstor sponsored a Media Center photography campaign in Venice, Italy, which produced over 340 panoramas of a range of historically significant sites from various eras in the city's history.

The Media Center has crafted a highly detailed, born-digital 3D model of the Villa Savoye which serves as a platform for several modes of exploration. The building can be viewed as an illustration of Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture with animations to demonstrate each element in context, making the digital tool an expression of those principles. Predefined itineraries move the viewer through the rooms of the Villa to replicate the flow of space experienced in-person. Additionally, the Villa can be rendered at various periods in its history to examine the differing paint colors over the span of its use and restorations.

A series of slides explaining Saussure's theories of semiotics as they relate to Modern Art, with illustrations.