PROJECTING THE PAST

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The mission of the Slide & Video Library at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation is to curate and archive the school's still and moving image collections. Founded in 1882 as the school's working library, one year after the opening of the school itself, the Slide & Video Library today provides images for teaching and research to faculty and students as well as collects 35mm slides from individuals whose work has been important in the field of architecture. The Slide & Video Library serves as a resource for image information and research, provides equipment for analog-to-digital image conversion, and acts as the interface between the past and present work of the school.


Projecting the Past: The Lantern Slide in Architectural Education is an exhibition and conservation project that will make the lantern slide collection of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation accessible to the public in both physical and digital form, while preserving these valuable images for future use.
The Lantern Slide in Architectural Education presents the impact of the now obsolete glass lantern slide on the evolution of architectural pedagogy

 

 


Exhibition Proposal: The exhibition takes place in two parts: a permanent display in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, where a rotating selection of the lantern slides of the Slide and Video Library at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation provides an immediate connection to the technology and teaching methods of the early twentieth century; and a temporary public exhibition at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in Buell Hall. The public installation is accompanied by an online database of the entire collection that gives an overview of the content, chronology, and significance of the materials.

Projecting the Past is literally a window into the advent of architectural education as practiced today, where the projected image, of architecture and landscapes both built and un-built, is the cornerstone of teaching.
Our proposal is to provide an educational exhibition on lantern slides, to conserve these important historical resources, and to produce a publicly-accessible online catalogue and database with digital reproductions of the images and research
completed for the exhibition. Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP), originally incorporated as the School of Architecture

 

in 1881 by William Robert Ware, is both one of the oldest and most prestigious schools of architecture in the United States, and thus its collection of over 25,000 architectural lantern slides is important for its content and its place in the history of architectural teaching.
The proposed public exhibition, Projecting the Past: The Lantern Slide in Architectural Education, builds upon a successful previous exhibition of lantern slides held in the GSAPP in 2010 and upon a small-scale permanent display that is already underway for the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library

 

 

. Where the previous exhibition was installed in a public corridor, the proposed exhibition will take place in the newly-renovated Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University's Buell Hall. Each of the lantern slides in the collection will be cleaned, scanned, and researched, its content and date of production determined, and the results published electronically in an online database. The exhibition design will include an interactive window into this catalogue, information on the history of lantern slides and their use in architectural education, and a display of the best examples from the collection.

 

In addition to providing information about the contents of the collection, the online catalogue will describe the history of lantern slides in architectural pedagogy, as well as the history of GSAPP's Slide and Video Library, the current caretakers of the slide collection.Lantern slides were used throughout the United States and abroad as a method of communicating visual information, and often represent spaces and views that are the oldest or only surviving record of past places. By displaying these historical artifacts and ensuring their continued preservation, Projecting the Past will conserve and make available a treasured source of historical, architectural, and pedagogical information.

Luisa Mendez, Curator, lfm2113@columbia.edu

Caroline Schermer Lebar, Assistant Curator, cgs2132@columbia.edu

Damon Lau, Assistant Curator, dl2653@columbia.edu