The Architecture and Urban Planning Collection
contains a variety of images from many sources. Included in the collection are images of urban planning projects from China, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Many of these images represent research projects of the College of Design Architecture, Art and Planning faculty and students. Images of the built environment are from the Cincinnati Preservation Association, professional and amateur photographers, and from students and staff at the University of Cincinnati. These images are available to the general public. The collection is growing continually.
19th Century Photography of Ancient Greece
The Nineteenth-Century Photography of Ancient Greece illustrates approximately 200 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. These images belong to the Getty Research Institute's Gary Edwards Collection and focus primarily on images of Greece, Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, South Italy, and Sicily. Visitors may browse the site by topic and monument title.
20th Century Canada: The Canadian Architectural Photography Web Project
provides an image repository containing 10,000 photographs of the Canadian built environment.
provides an image repository containing 10,000 photographs of the Canadian built environment.
20th Century American Architecture & Interior Design
A collection of over 29,000 images of architecture and interior design. Includes notable American homes.
AIA Index:
This database provides access to projects, architects, and journal articles from selected periodicals, published between the years 1982-1988.
American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920
From the Web site: “This collection of approximately 2,800 lantern slides represents an historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period 1850-1920. It represents the work of Harvard faculty, such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Bremer W. Pond, and James Sturgis Pray, as well as that of prominent landscape architects throughout the country. The collection offers views of cities, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens, including a complete history of Boston's Park System. In addition to photographs, views of locations around the country include plans, maps, and models.”
Asian Historical Architecture
This image and information database offers a photographic survey of Asia's architectural heritage. The collection contains over 8500 photos of 521 sites in eighteen different countries and takes contributions from many scholars and students. Visitors may browse by country, city or site. Maps of each country are also available for viewing.
ArchINFORM International Database
Focusing on 20th century and international architecture, this database originated from records of interesting building projects from architecture students. It is now the largest online-database about worldwide architects and buildings and includes over 13,000 projects, both built and unrealized.
ArchNet Digital Library
The ArchNet Digital Library offers images of Islamic Architecture. Images can be viewed by collection, country of location, building type, use or style, century or decade, and site name
Architecture Databases from the University of Michigan
Includes access to:
Archivision Architecture Images
Art, Architecture and Engineering Library
Art, Architecture and Engineering Library, Lantern Slide Collection
Bentley Image Bank, Bentley Historical Library
Borobudur
French Architecture
Historic Illustrations of Art and Architecture
Humanities Department (Dearborn)
ARTstor (UC access only)
300,000 images of architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, decorative arts, and design. Included in the image database is an Art History Survey Collection consisting of 4000 images and 20,000 architecture images from antiquity to the present. ARTstor allows users to create presentations and insert annotations; it can be used either on or offline. for a quick guide to using the database try More about ARTstor. Or download the ARTstor Software Manual (PDF format) which contains detailed instructions.
Cities and Buildings Database
This image and information database is made available through the University of Washington Libraries. The Cities and Buildings Database is a collection of images of buildings and cities is international in scope and spans across time. The collection receives contributions from a wide range of scholars and contains over 5000 images ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages, to the Parc de la Villette, and conceptual sketches and models of Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project.
Dearborn-Massar Collection
This image and information database available through the University of Washington Libraries offers the Phyllis and Robert Massar Photograph Collection of Pacific Northwest Architecture. The archive focuses on photographs of architecture in the Pacific Northwest during the period 1943-1963.
A Digital Archive of Architecture
Personal collection of architectural photographs taken by Professor Jeffrey Howe from Boston College.
Digital Image Access Project-Columbia/RLG
This database features images from Columbia’s DIAP collection. Highlights include the New American Ghetto Collection (images of the Bronx), the construction of the Empire State Building, the Amiens Cathedral, Italian Architecture, and the Aviador Collection of architectural drawings.
Glass, Steel, and Stone
This architecture image database is searchable in a variety of ways, but the main page sorts buildings by type, location, completion date, and address.
The Great Buildings Collection
This gateway to architecture around the world and across history documents over 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. For up-to-the-moment coverage of the latest buildings, designers, ideas, and trends, GreatBuildings.com is richly cross-linked with Architecture Week , the leading architecture magazine online and a current list of journal articles, which apply to architecture.
HABS & HAER: Historic American Buildings Survey & Historic American Engineering Record
This collection includes a diverse array of triumphs of architecture, engineering, and design in the U.S. and its territories, recorded by the National Park Service with cooperation from the Library of Congress and the private sector. Spanning from the Pre-Columbian period to the twentieth century, the database contains more than 350,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures, and is constantly expanding.
Historic Illustrations of Art and Architecture
19th and 20th century illustrations from various publications. These illustration are often subjective interpretations of the art and architecture depicted.
The Knowlton School of Architecture (KSA) Digital Library
Go to the guest login to see approximately 10,000 images of architecture from Ohio State's Knowlton School of Architecture
Maecenas Images
This collection of images is extracted from the personal collection of Leo C. Curran. The site highlights images from Ancient Greece and Rome, including imagery not only from the Mediterranean but also from throughout Europe. Visitors may perform a general search or browse the collection by site location.
Metropolitan Design Center
Image bank of over 17,000 images focusing on the Twin Cities in Minnesota from 1990-present.
Perseus Digital Library-Tufts University
This site is a digital library from Tufts University’s Classics collection, providing access to primary and secondary sources about ancient Greece and Rome. The site includes over 56,000 images and has expanded to cover a few additional topics other than ancient times.
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
A database that includes information about buildings, projects, architects, engineers, contractors, and over 93,000 images. Images and information focus primarily on structures in Philadelphia and the surrounding areas.
Professor Mary Ann Sullivan’s Digital Imaging Project - Bluffton College
This image database features over 11,000 images of art and architecture. Encompassing pre-history to the post-modern era, the database is divided by geographic locations, and also features a chronology and artist/architect index.
University of Minnesota Digital Collections
This database provides access to the University of Minnesota’s Digital Collections and includes over 5,000 architectural images.
Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)
The Society of Architectural Historians image exchange is compiled by member's personal image collections and created for educational use. The site has two databases: The World Survey and The American Survey. The first contains architectural imagery from around the globe where the second focuses on those architectural sites found in the United States. Both databases are arranged chronologically.
S P I R O
SPIRO is the University of California, Berkeley, Architecture Visual Resources Library. The site offers images and database information for a vast number of topography charts, plans, diagrams and images. The database is international in scope and covers prehistoric sites to the present day. Visitors may search by period, topic, creator name, title, subject and image I.D.