We would like galinsky to be as inclusive as possible, and welcome your contributions. We are always looking to extend our coverage and to incorporate a wide range of views.
If you have enjoyed visiting galinsky, why not help grow it by contributing your own building pages to the site? Galinsky receives more than 3 million page views each year. Each month, more than 70,000 people visit the web site; 10,000 visit more than once, and 5,000 visits are extensive explorations lasting for more than fifteen minutes. In addition, we are currently offering a thank-you payment of US$50 per accepted building page.
Below are some editorial guidelines and practical instructions for submitting pages.
Suggesting a building to contribute
When you have read what is involved, please email us with a suggestion for what you are looking to contribute, so we can confirm that it is within the scope of galinsky and that nobody else is currently preparing a page on the same building. Please e-mail Simon Glynn at simon@galinsky.com.
Editorial guidelines
The following guidelines are designed to help you and to make sure that galinsky maintains a high standard of quality and a clear and consistent purpose. Galinsky attracts visitors because it is more than a collection of photographs. A galinsky page does present images of the building, but also informs a little bit about it, in a way accessible to non-architects, and - as important as anything else - tells you how you can visit it (how to find it, whether it's open).
The practical visitor perspective is particularly critical because it's what's missing in other material about modern architecture. Galinsky was founded out of frustration with architecture books that are often vague even about whether a building was ever built or not, let alone whether it's still there or whether you can go see it. Other architectural web sites have grown up since, but rarely give you enough information to plan a visit, or to know what to see in a particular place. Galinsky is a practical guide to visiting buildings for real, as well as previewing them online. A building page in galinsky therefore has two roles: to provide in itself a creative way to experience the building (while never substituting a visit to the real thing); and to provide the practical information people need to explore the building further, through a real visit or other sites and books.
The photographs should therefore do more than provide an informative record of the building. They should ideally be creative in conveying the atmosphere of the building, through details of particular views one might experience, or broader perspectives of the building within its local landscape. The text should be readable by anyone with a general interest, and free of architectural jargon. We welcome a diversity of views and have no editorial position in terms of attitudes to different architectural movements and styles.
Specific content required
Please include in an e-mail submitting your page:
1. The following specific information:
Building name
City (or other way of identifying the location briefly)
Architect
Year of completion
Street address
2. Brief text in English free of architectural jargon, describing essential facts and whatever is interesting about the building, including for example: Who built it for whom, when and why? What is interesting in terms of architectural ideas? What have critics said about it? How is the building thought of now: how has it evolved, and what has it been like for its occupants? What is the experience for someone visiting the building today?
3. Brief text describing how to visit:
Where and how to find it (address and directions).
Whether it is open the public (and when, if simple and unlikely to change).
How to make appointments or check information.
Telephone number including country code (that can be called from anywhere internationally, e.g. in the US this should not be only an 800 number).
Web address for the building to get updated visitor information direct, if available.
4. Any other hyperlinks you may like to suggest to selected Internet sites that provide more depth on the building and, if you have ones to recommend, suggestions of any selected books we should link to at amazon.com.
5. Two or more photographs (typically three to five), attached in jpeg format, reasonably compressed for faster downloading, to fit in space 555 pixels wide as follows:
For the top of the page, either one landscape-format picture exactly 555 pixels wide (the ideal format if compatible with the building and your pictures); or two portrait-format pictures each exactly 270 pixels wide and each the same height as the other.
For within or below the text: other 555-wide landscapes or pairs of 270-wide portraits as above.
6. A copy of at least your top-of-page photograph in as high resolution as you have it (typically 3 Megapixels or higher), to allow enlarged 'Lightbox' viewing when you click the photo on the page (see example), to give us flexibility to publish in other formats in future as screen resolutions and download times improve, and to make available as an additional downloadable image. Please browse our existing pages to see the practical application of these guidelines.
7. Geo coordinates for Google Maps. To help us add a Google map embedded in the building page, please provide the Latitude and Longitude of the building. The easiest way to find this is to find the building in Google Maps; make sure it is in the center of the map window (double-click it to zoom in on it in the center, or right-click it and select 'center map here'); then paste the following code in the address line of your browser (where you normally type a Web address):
javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));
Your browser will return two numbers in parentheses, which are the coordinates we need, which you can copy and paste.
Attribution and conditions
Unless you tell us you want to be anonymous, we will attribute your page to you, including your name on the page. If you ask us to, we will hyperlink this name to whatever appropriate presence on the Internet you have outside galinsky, either a web site or an e-mail address. Our aim is to be as inclusive as possible, but in order to maintain the editorial quality standards of galinsky we may edit or refuse contributions we receive. If we edit a contribution significantly, we will submit the changes for your approval before we publish and attribute it. Unless otherwise agreed with you, we may subsequently publish the text or photographs contributed to galinsky in other forms, but will in any case continue to attribute them to you.
We hope you find these guidelines and conditions helpful. We look forward to receiving your proposals and contributions, and to building galinsky further with you.