Artstor and the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin collaborated on a project to digitize approximately 5,700 images from the Hal Box and Logan Wagner Collection of Mexican Architecture and Urban Design. The selection in Artstor richly documents architecture and outdoor communal spaces in Mexico, focusing on Pre-Columbian and 16th-17th century Colonial sites, and also including Post-Colonial structures from the 18th – 20th centuries.

Hal Box, a practicing architect, was Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976 to 1992. In 1988, he began to study and document the 16th-17th century open air churches of Mexico under the auspices of Earthwatch, with additional funding from the Graham Foundation, the University Research Institute, and the University of Texas Institute for Latin American Studies. Logan Wagner, a native of Mexico and an architect-builder with degrees in anthropology, architecture, and a PhD in Latin American Studies, led the field work for the next twelve summers. Box, Wagner, and volunteer groups carried out the photographic documentation and preparation of measured drawings of open air churches and other civic spaces in the states of Morelos, Mexico, Michoacán, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, and Hidalgo. Wagner extended the study with archival research.

In reaching this agreement, Elizabeth Schaub, Director of the Visual Resources Collection at the School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, expressed her enthusiasm for the collaboration with Artstor to preserve this unique archive and to make it available for educational use: “Our joint venture will result in a broader audience gaining access to unique content that finds a new life in digital form.” The school’s Visual Resources Collection is comprised of a growing collection of more than 140,000 digital images and over 250,000 slides that support the teaching and learning needs of the department’s faculty members and students.