A WorldWideWeb Multimedia Archive for the Study of the History of American Landscape Architecture

Reuben Rainey, Architecture (Landscape)

1996 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://cti.itc.Virginia.EDU/~rmr/docs/toc.html

The standard method for teaching history of architecture and landscape architecture is to use two slide projectors with images keyed to lecture notes. The professor is locked into an inflexible presentation system; students have very limited access to the images which constitute the content of their course. Reuben Rainey, Department of Landscape Architecture, proposes to use technology to address these limitations. Professor Rainey is creating a World-Wide Web archive of images, primary source material, and other digital material for the teaching and study of the history of American landscape architecture. The core of the archive will consist of about 2000 digitized images of individual works of American landscape architecture - photographed by Professor Rainey over the course of the last eighteen years - and an hour or more of video clips of relevant scenes or sites. The archive will be viewable through a hypertextually rich web site designed to offer the viewer many navigational choices. Virtual tours will lead the viewer through selected gardens; video clips will provide a sense of movement through space; detail sets will offer the closest possible view of many aspects of the garden design. No such archive of American landscape architecture currently exists, in any medium. This rich array of documentary material will provide a valuable resource for architects, planners, historians, and individuals in related fields, as well as for students of the landscape architecture at the University of Virginia.

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