Real Virtual | Columbia University in the City of New York
This History of Architecture Web site is designed to support undergraduate education, from introductory art and architectural history surveys to advanced courses on specific art historical periods and themes. The project has been funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Education Programs, with additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Office of the Provost, Columbia University.

The project began in 2000 at an inflection point in the transition from analog to digital visual resources in the art history classroom. With guidance from a distinguished Advisory Committee as well as a circle of interested faculty and students at a variety of colleges and universities, we learned through experience about the pedagogical issues facing educators dealing with complex built structures and environments in the classroom. Of the technologies realistically within reach of academic institutions, we focused on Quick Time Virtual Reality interactive panoramas as a feasible method of expanding the options for classroom presentations of architectural subjects. By acquiring interactive panoramas, or nodes, for important buildings ranging from the Parthenon in Athens to Le Corbusier’s Church of Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, we have attempted to collect and organize new media resources for the teaching of architectural history as we understand it to be practiced in American schools. We have been especially influenced by the pedagogical principles of Masterpieces of Western Art, the undergraduate core curriculum course at Columbia that focuses in depth on a limited number of important monuments to teach the fundamentals of visual literacy.

We have been aware of the impact of digital visual resources on faculty who are faced with both practical and philosophical issues raised by the transition to digital teaching. In response to this, we have designed a site that operates on several levels, from basic points of access for more than 500 panoramas to advanced programs that assemble suites of nodes in programs designed to underscore basic principles architectural history. In this way, we hope to have fulfilled the most important goal of the original proposal, to provide educators with a series of models and ideas for future development within the growing environment of freely accessible online teaching materials.