From the very first image digitised in house, a photograph of the Hoover Dam, to Louis Hellman’s Archi-têtes, the RIBA Library is continuously working to digitise its collections. To mark the milestone of the 100,000th image on RIBApix, Jonathan Makepeace, the RIBA’s Imaging Services Manager, describes the development of RIBApix into the world-class image resource it represents today.
Although RIBApix was launched in 2005 with fewer than 10,000 images online it immediately set an extremely high standard for online picture libraries. It comprises a continually expanding image database providing exceptional and unique images from the RIBA Collections. Since its launch RIBApix has become an important resource raising the profile of the Collections as well as offering a quick and efficient service to users. It also supplements our educational programmes and reduces the handling of the original objects making them subject to much less wear and tear.
RIBApix covers world architecture of all periods, together with related subjects such as interior design, landscape, topography, planning, construction and the decorative arts. Even the briefest of browsing of the site reveals the breadth and variety of material in the RIBA Collections. Spanning thousands of years of the world’s built heritage, the content ranges from ancient monuments and primitive rock dwellings to hotels, shops, factories, civic buildings and social housing. From everyday street scenes through to some of the world’s most iconic buildings, structures of every type and style feature in the collections, which are as much social documentation as architectural history.
RIBApix includes comprehensive collections of the work of leading photographers such as Dell & Wainwright, Martin Charles, John Donat, John Maltby, Monica Pidgeon, Tony Ray-Jones, Edwin Smith and Henk Snoek. Further breadth is given by many images from the archive of the Architectural Press used to illustrate the Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal. There are also well over 1,000 portraits of architects and artists, as well as famous figures such as comedians Spike Milligan and Jacques Tati, cookery experts Fanny and Johnny Craddock and the racing driver Stirling Moss.
Highlights of the Drawings Collection, which numbers more than 25,000 images on RIBApix, include works by Andrea Palladio, Inigo Jones, Charles Voysey, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Oliver Hill. Images of Battersea Power Station and Oliver Hill’s Midland Hotel, Morecambe remain popular, but the current bestsellers are those from the seminal This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956 as well as examples of Brutalist architecture.
RIBApix also benefits from significant acquisitions from practising architectural photographers, which have been added to our Photographs Collection making them available to a much wider audience. Nearly 100 photographers are represented, including internationally respected photographers such as Roland Halbe, Duccio Malagamba, Fulvio Orsenigo, Anne-Katrin Purkiss and Paolo Rosselli.
High resolution images from across the RIBA Collections continue to be added to RIBApix, created either by high quality Epson flatbed scanners or a large format Phase One camera.Technological advances have been adopted so that 3D objects such as models can be documented and represented to the highest standard. Outsized architectural drawings that are too large for conventional photography, such as Thomas Sandby’s 16-foot-long A Bridge of Magnificence, have been scanned in several parts and expertly stitched together to ensure every detail is captured. As a part of the digitisation process, and the RIBA’s commitment to education and research, each image is accompanied by comprehensive cataloguing detail. Important features of the site include advanced search facilities and free low-resolution downloads of most images for non-commercial educational use, the latter offering an invaluable resource for students and academics. The RIBA’s world-class collection of images is also available to licence or buy as prints either framed or unframed, up to A0 in size.
Here’s to the next 100,000 images!
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