Occidental College has contributed more than 2,000 images of California architecture from the archives of Robert Winter to the Artstor Digital Library.

A noted architectural historian, Winter photographed buildings and sites throughout California for more than 40 years. His work documents 19th- and 20th-century styles from Beaux-Arts to Art Deco, Spanish Colonial to Mission Revival, with a particular focus on the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1965, Winter co-authored the original Guide to Architecture in Southern California with David Gebhard. Revised and expanded in several editions, it remains the standard source for the study of the architecture in the greater Los Angeles area. Winter’s other publications further explore the role of architecture in the history of American society and culture. These include The California Bungalow (1980), American Bungalow Style (1996), Craftsman Style (2004), and The Architecture of Entertainment: L.A. in the Twenties (2006).

Robert Winter (1924-2019) was the Arthur G. Coons Professor of the History of Ideas, Emeritus at Occidental College, where he taught for more than 30 years. He lived in the Craftsman-style home of Ernest Batchelder (1875-1957), the subject of his 1999 monograph Batchelder: Tilemaker (In 2016, Winter curated the exhibition Batchelder: Tilemaker celebrating his donation of a collection of Batchelder tiles to the Pasadena Museum of History). Located in Pasadena, CA, the Batchelder House is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Winter’s images are available thanks to the generous donation of his slide collection to Occidental College.