ARTstor

The Charles Moore Foundation has embarked on an important project to digitize and make accessible on the internet the complete catalog of Moore's buildings and projects.

Not only is presenting the work to the international community of educators, students, and practitioners vital for continuing scholarship, but it is also a critical to the preservation of the actual images, since the physical materials, especially the 35 mm slides, are fugitive and subject to deterioration. Digitization significantly diminishes the need for handling actual slides, allowing them to be archivally stored for safekeeping.

What makes this project especially exciting is that it will be a collaboration with ARTstor, another non-profit organization. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, ARTstor has succeeded in creating an extraordinary online database. When it began, ARTstor was largely devoted to the visual arts, but is now expanding into architecture.

 

 

The project represents a huge undertaking for the Moore Foundation, given the array of Charles’s projects and collaborations—not to mention his collection of slides that number in the tens of thousands. The project’s first phase will be to scan and document slides currently at the Moore Foundation. The second phase will involve gathering related materials that collaborators, firms, and archives have in their own collections. The third phase will add selections from his travel slides—a collection that alone includes well over 60,000 images.

Given the scope of this undertaking, we are hoping that we can enlist as many of Charles’s colleagues, friends, and collaborators to sponsor a particular project. Remembering Charles’s preference for collaboration, we are hoping that the whole extended “family” can come together, and with our resources linked, make the project possible.