The Eiffel Tower on the Google Cultural Institute

The latest offering from the wonderful innovators at the Google Cultural Institute has a certain "je ne sais quoi." Paris' most visited monument, The Eiffel Tower has been given the digitial treatment in an exciting new project which, (attention all architects!) educates on the monument's masterful construction.

Three online exhibits blend the Towers's history with an excellent collection of items including rare archival images, photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and even reproductions of the original architect's plans by Gustave Eiffel.

The first exhibit explores the birth of the Eiffel Tower while the second provides step-by-step details of the construction of the monument through a showcase of itemised photographs and sketches. A look at the Tower's inauguration and first few visitors lies in the third exhibit. Its social impact was immediately manifest by the visitors' willingness to climb 1710 steps to reach the top! The Google Street View Team have filmed 360-degree views of the monument's architecture and provide the panoramic views seen over Paris on making the ascent.

Constructed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was built as a tribute on the 100 year anniversary of the French Revolution. In the same year, Paris held its Exposition Universelle, an exhibition for participating nations to showcase the advancements made in a heavily industrial age. The Tower's construction in two years, two months and five days is still hailed as an architectural achievement and an astonishing feat of French engineering. It remained the highest structure of its kind in the world for 40 years (a tile held today by the Burj Kalifa in Dubai) and continues to attract over 7 million visitors a year. As well as being France's most iconic symbol, this also makes it one of the world's most visited monuments!

We blogged about the marvellous Google Cultural Institute on the GSA Library Art & Design blog when it launched back in October last year. The virtual museum is amassing worldwide acclaim as it gathers momentum with the collections of some prestigious galleries and museums freely accessible to all. This latest project is tremendously exciting for bringing to life the architectural vision of Gustave Eiffel in the late nineteenth century and for the resources capabilities as a valuable educational resource! Vive la Google!

'Uneasy Balance' - New Book Edited by Christopher Platt

Chris Platt, Head and Professor at the Mackintosh School of Architecture is the editor of a new book 'Uneasy Balance,' a memento to the design and construction of the new building by Steven Holl Architects.

Published at the time of topping out, this slim, pocket-sized volume is a fitting tribute to the germination, growth and realisation of Holl's intelligent architectural design. The book is illustrated with specially commissioned photographs as well as drawings and sketches. Some of these drawings are the loose, inky architectural sketches from the office of Steven Holl Architects and some of the Mackintosh Building have been provided by the GSA's Archives and Collections Centre. The book contains four essays and an illuminating interview with Steven Holl in which he imparts the concept behind his "thin skin/thick bones" design, reveals some of his working practices and discusses architecture as art form.

Books are priced at £15 and can be purchased from the GSA shop. We'll also be cataloging a couple of copies to place on the shelves when the books reappear in September.

National Library Scotland Release Hutton Architecture Drawings

George Henry Hutton must have cut an interesting figure in the late eighteenth century, fascinated as he was by architecture in spite of losing an eye while serving a soldier in the Royal Artillery in the West Indies.

The National Library of Scotland certainly seem to think so and have added documents and drawings of Scottish churches and monuments from Hutton's collection to their digital gallery.

The collection is presented across two volumes and contains over 500 drawings, maps, plans and prints relating mainly to ecclesiastical buildings with a few more depicting castles and other dwellings such as this one showing the ruins of Innerwick Castle in East Lothian. Many of the drawings are by Hutton himself and show a sketchy, graphic style at odds with the picturesque scenes depicted. In some of the featured images the artist is unknown, however thanks to Creative Commons licensing, most can be reproduced, thereby forming a rich image-bank for architecture historians. Short blurbs for each image provide more contextual information.

One of the interesting quirks of the collection is that many of the buildings cited still exist today. Try entering in the name of a historic Scottish building or area into the National Library's search engine to see if Hutton recorded any details of your research area over two hundred years ago.

What's more, links can be made between the collection and GSA Library. The above image for example, entitled 'Part of Balmerino [missing text]' appeared in Volume 1 of Francis Grose's book, 'The Antiquities of Scotland,' a copy of which is held in the GSA Library's Special Collections. Check our thematic guide to rare books written about Scotland if historic architectural illustration and photography inspire your research.

'Scotia depicta' - Digital Library Materials

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) have just digitised 'Scotia depicta,' a book containing illustrated plates of nineteenth century Scotland's most picturesque landscapes, buildings, cities and towns. A search by town shows that plates of Edinburgh dominate the content, however we found this charming image of Glasgow's Royal Infirmary using a broad search. (Click on 'Browse and search' and select Subject/ content to search by structure or building type).

The plates were etched by James Fittler (appointed engraver to King George III) from drawings by John Claude Nattes. A brief blurb is given for each one, helping to give context to what are quite extraordinary depictions of a bygone time.

If this inspires you, NLS's full digital gallery can be viewed here for free. The photographs of old Edinburgh from the 1920s and those of the Forth and Tay Bridges under construction are of interest as, undoubtedly, so too is the access to high-resolution zoomable images of over 48,000 maps of Scotland.
http://digital.nls.uk/scotia-depicta/pageturner.cfm?id=74465058

GSA Building Plans on VLE

Exclusive to GSA staff and students are the drawing plans for the School's campus which can be found on the VLE. A commonly sought, but little known resource, the plans show the floor layout of the existing campus buildings. To access, log into Blackboard, and select the 'Course Catalogue' tab. From here, select the 'Support Services' folder and click on the link to GSA Estates. The 'Building Drawings' button contains detailed plans for the Mackintosh, and all subsequent buildings constructed on the Garnethill campus. Drawings of the Foulis Building and Newbery Tower are there to be analysed which may make for interesting comparison against the new Steven Holl building. Plans for the new build are not yet on the VLE. We'll blog about it if they become available! https://vle.gsa.ac.uk/

Architecture, Design & Engineering Drawings

The Architecture, Design, and Engineering category covers about 40,000 drawings (described in more than 3,900 catalog records), spanning 1600 to 1989, with most dating between 1880 and 1940. The designs are primarily for sites and structures in the U.S. (especially Washington, D.C.), as well as Europe and Mexico. American architects and architectural firms created most of the images. Building types range from the United States Capitol and the Library of Congress to private residences and hamburger restaurants.
Works by distinguished figures in the history of architecture, design, and engineering in the United States are well represented including Benjamin Henry Latrobe, William Thornton, Stephen Hallet, Thomas Ustick Walter, Montgomery C. Meigs, Cass Gilbert, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ade/

Network Rail's Virtual Archive

Network Rail, which has responsibility for the UK's railway infrastructure, has just launched online access to some of its extensive archive of engineering and architectural drawings, many of which date back to the very earliest days of railway construction. The high-quality images include some of the UK's best-known bridges and stations, and the database is searchable and includes a timeline.

Mackintosh Italian sketchbook website

The website which showcases the contents of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's wonderful 1891 Northern Italian sketchbook, held by Glasgow School of Art's Archives and collections, has received a makeover. It now incorporates 'turn the pages' technology to provide a more enjoyable browsing experience. The sketchbook's contents remain fully searchable, and the website retains the popular interactive Baedeker maps.

Palladio, Pozzo and Serlio digitised

Some months ago, we experimented with the digitisation of one of GSA Library's most treasured books, a 1581 edition of Palladio's 'I quattro libri dell'architettura', and made it freely available online via the Internet Archive. We've now finished adding a further 34 books to this online collection from across the art, design adn architecture disciplines, including Serlio's 'The first booke of architecture' (1611); Pozzo's 'Rules and examples of perspective' (1693); and a translation of Palladio's third and fourth books into English by Cole (1736). All the books can be viewed on the Internet Archive's website, and links have been made to them from the Library's online catalogue. They can even be ownloaded to handheld devices such as a Kindle...

Drawing on Riverside

I finally got round to visiting Glasgow artist Patricia Cain's superb exhibition 'Drawing on Riverside' at the Kelvingrove Museum at the weekend. Her drawings and paintings record in astonishing detail the construction of Zaha Hadid's new Glasgow Transport Museum and the regeneration of the surrounding area. The exhibition also features topographical works from Glasgow Museums showing how artists have captured the city's built environment in the past. The exhibition is free and runs until 14 August 2011.

Palladio's 'Four books of architecture'

Regular readers of this blog will know that we're doing what we can to provide our users with full-text e-content to complement our traditional printed collections. We're currently experimenting with the digitisation of some of our older and rarer material, and have just completed a pilot project to make our 1581 edition of Palladio's 'I quattro libri dell'architettura' freely available via the Internet Archive website. Click the link above to view this wonderful volume on your desktop.

Underground journeys

The V&A Museum in London in partnership with the RIBA Trust has been hosting an exhibition of original architectural drawings by Charles Holden. In case you can't make it to the exhibition, which closes on 11 February, a rather nice little guide providing background information on Holden's designs for London Transport can be downloaded from the architecture.com website.

Architectural drawing exhibition

Back in November I mentioned a Royal Glasgow Institute (RGI) competition to promote hand-drawn, rather than computer-generated architectural images. There are now just a couple of days left to view (and buy) the entries in Glasgow at the RGI's Kelly Gallery and the Glasgow Art Club, as the exhibition closes on 4 February.

Images from GSA Archives and Collections

GSA's Archives and Collections have been busy adding further images from the collections to their Flickr site, some of which will be of particular interest to architects. They include 20 images of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Art Lover's House competition entry, published in 1902 by Alexander Koch; various Beaux-Arts drawings by Eugene Bourdon; and photographic highlights from the post-war Gillespie, Kidd & Coia archive.

The Future in the Past

Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) will be presenting three artists' reflections on the rise and fall of the city's fascination with high-rise housing. The event takes place at the CCA at 7pm on Wednesday 19 January and will include a film screening, a photographic project, and the discussion of a new form of drawing specially developed to represent life in this type of housing.

2011 architectural drawing competition

This is a quick 'plug' for an architectural drawing competition hosted by the Royal Glasgow Institute (RGI) and the Norma Frame Foundation, and which is open to architects, architectural students, and anyone associated with the discipline. This UK competition will take place in January 2011 and seeks to promote hand-drawing, rather than computer-aided drawings. Further information is available on the RGI website.