The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) is excited to announce the launch of the student-led resource Avery/GSAPP Mosaic on Artstor Digital Library, an online database of images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences. The initiative aims to increase access to works and figures underrepresented in existing histories of architecture.

The Avery/GSAPP Mosaic is a repository of image-based architectural materials from collections in the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. This learning and teaching resource provides digital access to visual materials along with corresponding bibliographic information, including Avery call numbers.

The collection is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive, rather, it is positioned with the hopes that its fragmented and dispersed nature will generate expanded curiosity in global architectural discourses as its title Mosaic indicates. The collection includes institutional, residential, and religious architecture from seventy-eight countries, predominantly in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as well as from the Americas, from the early modern period to the present. Graduate student researchers have focused especially on Black, queer, female, and indigenous creators. Mosaic is a teaching tool that decenters and destabilizes canonical architectural history and situates works outside of the canon as central to our recognition of how, why, by whom, and for whom architecture is produced and archived.

The project is the result of many years of collaboration between Graduate Research Assistants in the History Theory Sequence at Columbia GSAPP and colleagues at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, with financial support from Columbia University Libraries.


Access

Access to Artstor is provided to subscribing institutions, including Columbia University and the New York Public Library.


About Columbia GSAPP

Among the world’s leading research universities, Columbia University in the City of New York continuously seeks to advance the frontiers of scholarship and foster a campus community deeply engaged in the complex issues of our time. Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) offers a range of programs in architecture, historic preservation, planning, real estate development, and urban design that bring together imagination, experimentation, and critical thinking towards new forms of practice. GSAPP is committed to shaping a more equitable, sustainable, and creative world by engaging architecture and the built environment from diverse and global perspectives. The school functions as an urban condenser of ideas and drives innovation and change through the leadership of its faculty, the excellence of its academic programs, the expansion of interdisciplinary opportunities as well as the richness of its research initiatives and events. More information about Columbia GSAPP’s academic programs and research initiatives, public exhibitions and events, and publications can be found at arch.columbia.edu.