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Mapping Venice: Students take on the city of water

By Paul Bennett

One of the biggest frustrations of architectural-history professors is that the material they teach and the students to whom they’re teaching it are often separated by thousands of miles. Ask any of them what they’d do for their students with a million bucks, and most would say, charter a private jet and let their students visit and experience first-hand the great monuments of the world.

Images courtesy Columbia University

Jacopo de’Barbari, View of Venice, 1500 (woodblock print), one section of six, Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Cassy Juhl photographing in the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute.

David Rosand, professor of art and architectural history at Columbia University, doesn’t have a million bucks to spend on his students. So, when it came time to teach them about the city of Venice—arguably one of the most complicated urban spaces in the world—he cast about for a new approach.

Enter the Visual Media Center at Columbia, a research lab that fuses technology with the study of art and architecture. The center specializes in overlapping a variety of visual data—plans, sketches, historical documents, photography, measurements, and QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panoramas—to make sense of complex environments. Over the past several years, the Center has collaborated with professors such as Rosand to map places as diverse as modern Istanbul and the Romanesque churches of the Bourbonnais, in France.

“What we had in mind was [to create a Web site] that would introduce students to the very particular urban fabric of Venice, but in a definitely historical context,” says Rosand. To achieve this, he used as his baseline the aerial view of Venice carved in wood by the Venetian painter Jacopo de’Barbari dating to 1500—called the Barbari plan. Rosand designated dozens of “hotspots” on the plan, such as the Scuole San Rocco or Basilica San Marco, where a plethora of architectural and urban information comes together. As one mouses over the plan, this information begins to pour forth. At one moment, you’re looking at a plan view of a square, then an aerial photograph, then you’re in a virtual model of a Renaissance church that sits on the square, reconstructed from contemporary photos and sketches, looking at the artworks that were originally painted for the building but are now dispersed in art collections around the world. In the next moment, you’re twirling about the room riding one of the nifty QTVR panoramas that really make you feel like you’re inside the structure.

“Much of our work begins with a frustration with conventional pedagogical techniques—in particular, the side-by-side slide comparison [traditionally used in art-history classes]—for representing works of architecture, archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, and cities,” says James Conlon, director of the Media Center. To simplify things, Conlon’s group developed a “digital magnifying glass” (created in Flash by VMC designer Juliet Chou) that keeps the viewer on the main page—in this case, the de’Barbari woodcut—while being able to peer quickly into the other layers of information. “Without pretending to create an illusion, we present the [city’s art and architectural treasures] in situ, allowing students a fuller notion of their original settings and visual relationships,” says Rosand. “Not a substitute for going over there, but a good preparation.”

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