Library Guides: Environmental Design Archives: Images

Searching for Images Online

The Environmental Design Archives disseminates information about and digital images of our collections’ items in several online venues. We publish finding aids and project indexes for our collections on the Online Archive of California, digital versions of our past physical exhibits to our Online Exhibits page, and groups of digitized items to our Virtual Collections page, and Calisphere, the online portal to digitized items from California cultural institutions.

Note that archives are often an excellent source of images. See the guide Image Sources for the Built Environment or Image and Sound databases for more resources.

Search Tips

For additional sources, check Guide to Library catalogs under Subject Keyword: [name of subject]--pictorial, e.g., Subject Keywords: School buildings pictorial, or Mount Vernon pictorial.

American landscape and architectural design, 1850-1920
Harvard Univ. This collection of approximately 2,800 lantern slides represents an historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period 1850-1920. Offers views of cities, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens. In addition to photographs, views include plans, maps, & models. Also indexed in the American Memory project.

American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library This link opens in a new window
Primary source and archival materials covering topics such as art and architecture, performing arts, technology and applied sciences.
Millions of digital items from more than 100 historical Library of Congress collections.
ARTstor This link opens in a new window
A repository of more than 1 million high resolution art, architecture, and design images with associated catalog data.
A repository of more than 1 million digital images and associated catalog data. The collection is designed to be used by students and faculty for teaching and research in art history, as well as many other disciplines. Includes several collections such as: The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive; Native American Art and Culture from the Smithsonian; the Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts, etc. Short instructional videos are available online. See: Intro to the new ARTstor, Downloading images to PowerPoint, Batch download tool, and Making an image group.

California Heritage Collection

Cities and Buildings Database This link opens in a new window
A collection of over 12,000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world.
A collection of over 5000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages to the Parc de la Villette. Users can now search for buildings by country, city, style, title, architect, date of construction, as well as other fields. Images have all been scanned from original slides or drawn from documents in the public domain. Freely available to anyone with access to the Web for use in the classroom, student study, or for individual research purposes.

Environmental design videography
A videography of videos and DVDs in the UC Berkeley Media Resources Center on the built environment, including cities, city planners, and city planning. Noncirculating except to UCB faculty for classroom use.
Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey
Luna Commons
San Francisco Public Library digitized images
Searchable by subject or neighborhood.

Selected Visual Books

American architecture, a history / by Leland M. Roth. Boulder, Colo.: Icon Editions/Westview Press, 2001.

Architecture in America: a photographic history from the colonial period to the present / by Wayne Andrews. Rev. ed. New York : Atheneum, 1977.

The Architecture of the United States / G. E. Kidder Smith; in association with the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1981

Early illustrations and views of American architecture. Edmund V. Gillon, Jr. New York, Dover [1971] Dover pictorial archive series.

World architecture index: a guide to illustrations / Edward H. Teague. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Art reference collection; no. 12. Arranged by city with indexes by work and architect.

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Environmental Design Archives: Images

Searching for Images Online

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Selected Visual Books