A New Look at Old Buildings
By Victor Wishna

Humanities Magazine, DC
March 22 2005

>>From the nave floor of the Amiens Cathedral in northern France,
Stephen Murray’s gaze sweeps upward to the vault high above. “This
really is my favorite view inside the cathedral,” he says, pointing
out the diagonal and transverse ribs that crisscross the ceiling of
this Gothic structure completed in 1269, a mere forty-nine years
after construction began. “It was really quite quick,” he says.

Click. Now he is in Turkey, soaring over the rooftops and zipping
through the streets of historic Istanbul. “Ooh, look at that!” Murray
exclaims, pointing to the intricate stonework in the courtyard of the
Sultan Ahmet Mosque, built in 1616. “I’ve not seen that before.”

Click. A building looks familiar . . . the Parthenon? “This is the
treasury,” he says. “Let’s go into the main hall.” Suddenly he is
standing before the statue of Athena, her golden veneer shimmering in
the light rays reflecting off the pool at her feet.

Of course, he’s not really in the Parthenon; it’s a reproduction in
Nashville, Tennessee. And he’s not exactly in Nashville, either-nor
was he in Amiens or Istanbul, but in Room 605 of Schermerhorn Hall,
Murray’s comfortable but architecturally less impressive office at
Columbia University.

Murray, a professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology
and founder of its Visual Media Center, conducts his whirlwind tour
across continents entirely on the small screen of his PowerBook. Each
tap on the touch pad reveals another lifelike panorama offering
360-degree views in every direction.

These “nodes”–image modules rendered in QuickTime Virtual Reality
(QTVR)–are all part of the Visual Media Center’s new History of
Architecture web project supported by NEH ().
When the site officially launches this spring it will contain more
than six hundred such nodes encompassing dozens of buildings, from
temples in Greece to the great churches of Europe and shrines of
Yemen and Iran, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in
Pennsylvania. Even in its nascent stages, the site is revolutionizing
the teaching of architecture and changing the way professors and
their students see and think about buildings that have stood for
centuries.

“There are a lot of new issues being raised-and that’s part of what
technology does,” says Robert Carlucci, who took over as director of
the Visual Media Center in 1999 and has overseen the rapid growth of
the History of Architecture project. “It’s a lot more information.
The psychology of the classroom is really changing.”

“What the media has done is not just unleash all these wonderful
images, but it allows you to ask questions that otherwise wouldn’t
have occurred to you,” Murray says, such as “‘How does it feel? What
do you hear?'”

The new technology, says Murray, allows for the dispersal of old
assumptions and for discussions that go beyond structural design. For
example, by enabling students to peer up into the corners, to see
where the vaulting shafts had been reinforced with chains and the
flying buttresses refortified and replaced, the node reveals that
Amiens was not the sturdy feat of engineering that stood the test of
time.

“There’s this old-fashioned view that Gothic architecture was driven
bit by bit, that it was so technical,” Murray says, when in fact, it
was the result of a series of creative leaps. “It was the ideological
that drove the thing, not the empirical.” He acknowledges that George
Lucas of Star Wars fame makes for a good analogy to a Gothic planner:
“Both projected a dream where the technology didn’t yet exist, but
that dream had an amazing effect.”

The lesson, he says, is that “scientific revolutions often come with
a paradigm shift,” that is, through grand visions rather than
incremental advancements. In the case of Gothic architecture, such
plans brought together great theologians, planners, and masons, who
otherwise wouldn’t interact.

An up-close look at the pilier columns and vault ribs reveals that
the magnificent concave and convex shapes of the cathedral were
created through the relatively low-tech methods of printing and
stamping, similar to how Jell-o retains the shape of a mold. For this
reason, Murray says, cathedrals were viewed as repositories of
memory; in medieval times, stamping-to stamp an image on the
brain-was the metaphor for memory. “Today, of course, that metaphor
is the computer,” he says.

The new technology has already been incorporated into the
undergraduate core curriculum at Columbia, one of the few
universities to include structural design in its required courses.
“The idea is that any educated person should have something to say
about a piece of architecture,” Murray says. Some of the nodes have
been used to teach at colleges and private high schools on an
experimental basis, and the goal of the site is to make them
accessible to teachers everywhere.

“More and more schools have electronic classrooms,” Carlucci says.
“That’s especially true at community colleges and state schools-more
than in the Ivy League in a lot of ways.”

While the project has blossomed in the last few years, its seeds were
planted nearly a decade ago, at the dawn of userfriendly
virtual-reality technology. Murray had been interested in “animating
architecture” ever since, as an undergraduate at Oxford more than
thirty years ago, he was part of an expedition to film an
eleventh-century cathedral in Armenia.

By the time he arrived at Columbia to teach medieval architecture in
1986, he had grown frustrated with the visual resources available,
especially because most great cathedrals stood on the other side of
the ocean. “There’s only so many times I could take my students to
St. John the Divine, which is a beautiful building, and we’re lucky
to have it,” he says of the nineteenth-century church that rises a
few blocks from Columbia’s campus. “Otherwise, I had to rely on
pictures. I can’t bring Amiens Cathedral into my classroom.”

With the help of colleagues in the architecture school and a grant
from NEH, he created a three-part film series entitled The Amiens
Project to recreate the geometric conception and construction of the
cathedral. The experience gave Murray the idea to animate the
medieval segment of Columbia’s core curriculum. This initiative led
to the founding of the Visual Media Center, which has since been
folded into the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Student response to the medieval component was so positive that it
seemed shortsighted to stop there. “That’s when the idea arose that
we could create a general resource for the history of world
architecture,” says James Conlon, a staff research associate who has
worked on the site since 1999, collecting much of the imagery from
Turkey and Yemen. “Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Byzantine,
Islamic, even modern–we kept expanding.”

Today, the site contains all those categories, and a few more. In
many cases, the nodes are paired with interactive floor plans of the
building, enabling users to click on a “hot spot” to see the
perspective from that point. Some views are from dramatic
locations-thirty feet up on the triforium, on the roof, even inside
the massive spire-where normal tourists never go.

There is almost no text on the site, which is by design. Carlucci
says the idea is to make the site as user-friendly as possible, a
place to explore and discover rather than read. “The kind of
intellectual excitement one gets from a building-it dies on the page
with all this boring prose,” Murray says. “The whole idea that we
don’t have to kill the work of art in order to study it is a fabulous
thing.”

Most of the photography from Amiens and other medieval
sites–particularly the precarious shots from the parapets–is the
work of Andrew Tallon, a doctoral student in early Gothic
architecture.

As Tallon explains it, the technology is, conceptually at least,
rather simple. A highresolution digital camera is attached to a
special tripod and carefully calibrated to take several dozen photos
around a central point. These photos are then stitched together using
virtual-reality software. It’s a little like the tourist who takes
several overlapping pictures, and then, after developing them, cuts
and pastes them together to create his own 360-degree panorama. Only
the site’s panoramic nodes are perfectly seamless spheres and can be
downloaded from the Internet.

On the site, most nodes are rendered at low resolution so they can be
accessed with low-speed connections. For classroom use, the nodes can
be rendered at high resolution for a teaching demonstration that’s
light years beyond blurry slides. “I was able to zoom into
individual, sculptural details and move around without ever having to
change photographs,” says Tallon, who taught an introductory art
history class at Columbia last year. “This is an extraordinary
advance in terms of teaching medieval sculpture. The node is able to
preserve an entire view of a space in a way that no other
photographic technology can.”

Beyond the classroom, the most beneficial aspect of the site may be
in how it lets anyone explore the great buildings of the world at
their own pace, in their own homes, without the interference of tour
guides “charging ahead with their brightly colored umbrellas,” Murray
says.

Murray says he had two objectives when he began the project: first,
that it should provide students access to the same resources their
professors use, and second, that it should bring together faculty
from different institutions to form new collaborative relationships.

The first mission has been a success. Rather than sending students
home with only their notes and memories of the slides they saw in
class, “now I can say, ‘Go study Amiens Cathedral,’ and they can.
It’s changed me as a teacher,” Murray says. “I’m a much better
teacher than I was just a few years ago.”

While Murray and Carlucci have recruited colleagues at MIT, Bryn
Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and other institutions to contribute to the
site–Murray envisions a single great online course called Medieval
Architecture with each expert adding a segment-getting them to
actually use it has proven more challenging.

For some, the technology–and what it offers-may be intimidating.
“Say you’re a faculty member who’s been teaching the same image since
the beginning of time because that’s the only one that had been
published,” Carlucci explains. “And maybe that image was a view down
the center of the building. Well, now suddenly students can look up
and see something going on in the ceiling. Before you know it, you’ve
got questions being thrown at you that you were never prepared for.”

But Murray believes teachers will learn to welcome those
uncertainties. “I was amazed at how my students, on their own,
grasped the subtleties,” Tallon says from Paris, where he is
continuing to shoot for the site while completing his thesis on
flying buttresses. “They managed to understand spatial aspects of
Gothic architecture that would have taken an actual trip to the
building to communicate otherwise.”

And even then, says Murray, they may not get quite as good a look.
“The only way to get that perspective is to lie on your back in the
middle of the floor,” he says, studying his favorite view of Amiens.
“In reality, that’s not something you’re likely to do.”

Victor Wishna is a writer in New York City.

Columbia University received $575,000 from NEH to create the History
of Architecture web project. Stephen Murray received an NEH
fellowship and grant of $138,000 to create a multimedia education
tool on Amiens Cathedral. Murray has conducted four NEH summer
seminars for college teachers on the Gothic in the Ile-de-France.