Before his retirement, Murray held the Lisa and Bernard Selz chair in Medieval Art History at Columbia University.
He completed his MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1969, writing on the cathedral at Troyes[8] before earning his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in 1972 under Peter Kidson.
[5] According to Murray, his interests in visually documenting Medieval architecture started during his undergraduate years at Oxford, where he was a part of an expedition to film an 11th-century Armenian cathedral.
[9] He first visited Amiens Cathedral before he began his teaching career in the United States, following in the footsteps of Englishmen like John Ruskin, whom Murray considers his hero.
[n 2] It was the inaugural project for the Visual Media Center, both of which were supported with a funding from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH).
The website also contained recreations of the Medieval composer Pérotin's music, primary documents associated with the cathedral, supplemented by secondary information from Murray's own monograph.
The website is a database of visual images, in the format of QuickTime VR panoramas ('nodes') of various buildings from across the world, representing a wide range of architectural styles.
[10] Murray argues that Gothic architecture grew out of desires to replicate shapes and images from the natural world (for instance, trees and branches carved in stone), and was a way to look back to admired historic architectural design by the Merovingians, and also looking forwards and creating something new, for instance "the pointed arch as an indexical sign of a break with the past".
[2][3] In doing so, he reveals how internal politicking and financial decisions influence the design of medieval cathedrals as much as religious doctrine.
[2] Murray also discusses how writing by Villard de Honnecourt, "author of a pictorial treatise on Gothic art and architecture", invented the meaning of Gothic, and how Abbot Suger's writing about the abbey church at St Denis influenced the phases of re-building and re-design the site.