Images and Media

Aerial Photography Florida

"Aerial photography Florida is a collection of aerial photographs taken between 1930 and 2000. Literally, a portrait of the State, the collection will be comprised of hundreds of thousands of aerial photographs documenting the land use of Florida over time. Zoomable high resolution images represent every inch of Florida. Searchable databases and a map interface offer users easy access to the collections. The collection will continue to grow as multiple agencies make their images available."(PALMM) Viewing these photographs will require use of GIS systems.

Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America

This digital collection is part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project. The photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner were taken between 1935 and 1955. The collection is comprised of over 29,000 images primarily of architectural subjects, including interiors and exteriors of homes, stores, offices, factories, historic buildings, and other structures. Subjects are concentrated chiefly in the northeastern United States, especially the New York City area, and Florida. Included are the homes of notable Americans, such as Raymond Loewy, and of several U.S. presidents, as well as color images of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Many of the photographs were commissioned by architects, designers, owners and architectural publications, and document important achievements in American 20th-century architecture and interior design.

archINFORM

Architecture of the 20th century is the main theme of this international database. “It includes over 12,000 built and unrealized projects from various architects and planners.”

Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record

Part of the American Memory Project, this site represents two collections from the Library of Congress. "The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright."

Cities / Buildings Database

Developed by the University of Washington and conceived as a multi-disciplinary resource for students, faculty, and others in the academic community, the Cities/Buildings Database is a collection of digitized images of buildings and cities. These images have all been scanned from original slides or drawn from documents in the public domain. They are freely available for use in the classroom, student study, or for individual research purposes.

Digital Archive of American Architecture and Digital Archive of Architecture

These image archives from Boston College Professor Jeffrey Howe consists of digitized images of American and European architecture and in some cases includes explanatory material. The American archive was originally constructed as a supplement to the course "FA 267 From Saltbox to Skyscraper: Architecture in America that surveys the development of architecture in America from the 17th century to the present, with particular emphasis given to local architectural monuments."

Great Buildings Collection

This searchable site "documents a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, with 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures of all kinds."

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Florida

These maps, made available by the University of Florida, "were mainly designed to help fire insurance agents determine the degree of damage to a property and show accurate information to help them determine risks and establish premiums. They showed the size (including color-coding), shape and construction of buildings (brick, adobe, frame, etc), dwellings (including hotels and churches), and other structures such as bridges, docks and barns. Along with fire stations, you could also find water facilities, sprinklers, hydrants, cisterns, and alarm boxes as well as firewalls, windows, doors, elevators and chimneys and roof types. The maps included street names, property boundaries and lot lines, and house and block numbers. Other information such as the latest census figures, prevailing winds; railroad lines and Indian reservations and topography were included. Today, the maps are an invaluable guide to inner-city history, land use, and historic preservation." (PALMM)

SPIRO (Slide and Photographic Image Retrieval Online)

This is an online catalog to the University of California, Berkeley Architecture Slide Library collection of over 200,000 35mm slides. As of January 2004, SPIRO contained over 63,000 records linked to images, approximately 20% of AVRL's total slide collection. Thirty-three percent (33%) of the images in SPIRO come from images in books. These are produced in-house by copy stand photography under the fair use and educational copying provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. Eleven percent (11%) of the images in SPIRO derive from copy stand photography from periodicals, also produced in-house. Thirty-eight percent (38%) of the images are donor- supplied, and eighteen percent (18%) are purchased from commercial slide vendors. NOTE: See the link on copyright located on the SPIRO search page before downloading any images.

This page is maintained by:
Stephanie Brenenson
brenenso@fiu.edu
Modesto A. Maidique Campus - Green Library
Florida International University

Last revised: June 2011