Welcome to Our Architectural History Guide
Courtesy Chicago Historical Society - Rookery Building, 209 South LaSalle Street, Chicago, Cook County, IL
EXTERIOR FROM NORTHEAST IN THE LATE 1880's
Digitized by the Library of Congress's Historic American Buildings Survey
Subject Specialist
Deering Library, 3rd Floor
Northwestern University Library
1970 Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL 60208
Welcome!
Need research help or want to discuss a project? Contact the Art Library any time, or stop by in person any time we are open. We look forward to working with you!
You can use this guide to help you find many of the resources the Architecture Reading Room at Northwestern University Libraries has to offer. Located on the third floor of the historic Charles Deering Library, the Architecture Reading Room features general books on architectural history, many rare 19th- and early-20th-century architectural periodicals, and quiet reading space.
Art Library website (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/art)
Choosing Keywords
Getting started on your research? This video will show you how to come up with keywords based on your research topic.
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Best Bets! Online Library Reources for Architectural History
- Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new windowAccess point for the Grove Dictionary of Art and several Oxford reference sources on art and architecture. The Grove Dictionary of Art is the most complete encyclopedia of art available in English, featuring nearly 50,000 articles on a variety of topics including art movements, artists biographies, and countries. Articles are signed, include brief bibliographies, and images. Images are searchable and made available through Oxfords partnerships with museums, galleries and arts organizations.
- Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals This link opens in a new windowThe Avery Index to Architectural Periodicalsindexesarticles published in U.S. and foreign journals 1930-present coveringinternational, scholarly and popular periodical literature on the architecture and design of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. It also provides citation records for architects' obituaries.Subjects include architecture, city planning, conservation and restoration, interior design, museums, and sustainable design.
- Artstor This link opens in a new windowWith more than 2 million images* (and growing), scholars can easily examine wide-ranging material such as Native American art from the Smithsonian, treasures from the Louvre, and modern architectural plans from Columbia University.
Composed of approximately 300 curated sub-collections, Artstor supports and enriches study across disciplines, including world events from Magnum Photos, anthropology from Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and archaeology from Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Art Archives and, making it a resource for your whole institution.
More Architectural History Reference Sources
Other good places to start familiarizing yourself with architectural history topics are online reference sources.
Oxford Art Online, our subscription resources mentioned above, is one (the best) general art/architecture reference source. Here are a few other good online reference sources in architecture -- these can all be found online for free:
- Archinform International Architecture DatabaseAn online database with information on more than 65,000 built and unrealized projects from various architects and planners, mainly 20th century. You can look up projects by architect, town, or keyword, and results are presented in a wiki-style form (freely available online to all).
- Built Works Registry70,000 openly accessible and shareable core records for works of architecture and the built environment compiled by the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, Artstor, and the Getty Research Institute (freely available online to all).
- Chicago Architecture FoundationAn essential stop for Chicago projects, the Chicago Architecture Foundation's site includes a visual dictionary and a Buildings of Chicago database (freely available online to all).
- Domestic Interiors DatabaseA scholarly research tool that includes textual and visual sources and points the researcher towards analytical issues associated with representing the interior since the Renaissance in Western Europe and North America (freely available online to all).
- GreatBuildingsDocuments a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, selected by the editors of ArchitectureWeek magazine (freely available online to all).
- SAH ArchipediaHistories, photographs, and maps for more than 2000 structures in 710 cities and 20 states selected by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) (freely available online to all).
- world-architectsA commercial site that provides profiles of selected architects, searchable by country, region, and role, especially useful for finding information on architectural firms around the world (freely available online to all).
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