New SAHARA Images in ARTstor

More than 16,000 images of architecture, landscape design, and the built environment from the Society of Architectural Historians’ (SAH) SAHARA project are now available in the ARTstor Digital Library. SAHARA (Society of Architectural Historians Architecture Resources Archive) is a community-built archive of digital images for teaching and research in the field of architectural history.

View the collection here. Via the ARTstor Blog.

NOVA: Building the Great Cathedrals

NOVA’s Building the Great Cathedrals is now available to watch on the PBS website.

Take a dazzling architectural journey inside those majestic marvels of Gothic architecture, the great cathedrals of Chartres, Beauvais and other European cities. Carved from 100 million pounds of stone, some cathedrals now teeter on the brink of catastrophic collapse. To save them, a team of engineers, architects, art historians, and computer scientists searches the naves, bays, and bell-towers for clues.

 

Alice Weston Great Houses in LUNA

Images from the University of Cincinnati Libraries Digital Collections, including architectural photographs by Alice Weston, are available in LUNA Commons:

Environmental artist Alice Weston photographed many of the houses in this collection in the 1990s for the publication Great Houses of the Queen City : Two Hundred Years of Historic and Contemporary Architecture and Interiors in Cincinnati, text by Walter E. Langsam, 1997. This collection of over 1400 images includes not only the photographs seen the book, but many more interior and exterior views as well as other properties not included in the publication.

LUNA Commons collections are contributed by partnering institutions from around the world. Please contact the VRC for a LUNA tutorial.

Chicago Architecture Foundation’s openhousechicago 2011

We’ve all done it…walked or driven by a building and thought, “I wish I could see what the inside looks like”. Well, now you can.

Over the weekend of Oct 15-16, 2011, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is proud to present openhousechicago 2011 (OHC2011), a free public event that gets you behind-the-scenes of some of the city’s greatest spaces and places.

Whether you are an architecture buff, history enthusiast, or cultural novice, OHC2011 is a unique event that’s fun for all ages, locals and visitors, suburbanites and city dwellers. Participating in OHC2011 is like getting a “backstage pass” to many of Chicago’s most important and interesting buildings.

openhousechicago is a free public event. You can plan your own itinerary. No reservations or tickets are required, but you can register for up-to-date information and to win prizes.

Robert L. Van Nice Collection: Images of the Hagia Sofia

Archivists at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection are currently processing the papers of Robert L. Van Nice and blogging about the process. Robert L. Van Nice undertook an extensive architectural survey of Hagia Sophia between 1937 and 1985. His collection includes fieldwork materials, architectural drawings, and photographs, and some of these have been digitized and posted to the blog.

Chicago’s Boulevard System Could be Recognized as “Historic Place”

The city’s landmarks commission will vote this week to decide if eight major Chicago parks–and the 26-mile boulevard system that connects them–deserves a spot on the National Register of Historic Places… If ultimately approved by the National Park Service, the designation would recognize the importance of the city’s park and boulevard system and open the door to the possibility of state and federal historic tax credits to assist the rehab of pre-World War II buildings along the thoroughfare.

Via WBEZ.

SCI-Arc to Create Comprehensive Digital Lecture Archive

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has received two major grants from the NEA and Getty Foundation that will be used to create the SCI-Arc Digital Lecture Archive.

This free web archive will contain more than 1,000 hours of key architectural and design lectures and symposia from 1974 to the present that will be accessible online, via phone applications, e-readers, and other new media channels… The SCI-Arc Digital Lecture Archive will provide access to never before seen footage of some of the most influential leaders in architecture and design, including Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, David Hockney, Rem Koolhaas, John Lautner, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Kazuyo Sejima, and many more… Scheduled to be launched in 2012—coinciding with SCI-Arc’s 40th anniversary—the SCI-Arc Digital Lecture Archive will feature a sophisticated search engine that will allow access to both entire lectures as well as specific segments of each lecture, placing the school’s significant archive at one’s fingertips.

Via Archinet.

Geometry and Architecture at the Graham Foundation

The current exhibition at the Graham Foundation, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, explores the work of one of the first women to ever receive a fellowship from the Foundation, as well as one of the first women to receive a Masters of Architecture from Harvard University.

This exhibition presents the work of the visionary architect and theorist Anne Tyng. Since the 1950s, when she worked closely with Louis I. Kahn and independently pioneered habitable space-frame architecture, Tyng has applied natural and numeric systems to built forms on all scales, from urban plans to domestic spaces.

The exhibition will be on view in Chicago until June 18, 2011 at the Graham Foundation.

UofC Lantern Slides in the New York Times

Lantern slides that belonged to the University of Chicago Visual Resources Center were donated to Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Project, which was featured in a recent New York Times article.

Mr. Gates has combined a former candy store, a single-family house and a duplex across the street into a site of artistic and community change for a neighborhood that has suffered years of blight and cultural neglect. The installation is an entry in a growing art movement to create “hybridized” arts spaces that serve multiple functions, taking inspiration from installations in Houston and Los Angeles, as well as in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood in a community center called the Experimental Station.

 

Department of Urban Speculation at the MCA

During the month of April an installation by Chicago architect Alex Lehnerer and his Department of Urban Speculation will be the featured UBS 12×12 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This work, called Roadside Attractions,

looks at such ubiquitous and abundantly available urban elements, or “attractions” that are perpendicular to the road: doors, roofs, windows, lobbies, stairs, or walls. The exhibition examines how these can become protagonists, which, if exaggerated, over-extended, or misused, can form the urban between structure and situation.

The architect’s Department of Urban Speculation, founded in 2009,

was set up to create a link between Lehnerer’s work as practicing architect and urban designer and his academic role in the same fields.

Alex Lehnerer will give a free Artist Talk in conjunction with the exhibition on Tuesday, April 12th at 6pm. The “First Friday,” April 1st, marks the unofficial opening of the show. UBS 12 x 12 is a program at the MCA designed to feature new work by new artists. An archive of past exhibitions is available here.