Suggestions for photo gallery?

I am designing a site to show some landscape architecture projects that I have done. Sort of an online portfolio. I have designed the layout, but I have been struggling for several days to actually implement it in Drupal. Would appreciate any suggestions.

My desired layout is 3 columns. Left column is only 140px wide and is used for the menu in which each project is listed by name. Middle column is 220px wide and contains a grid of thumbnail images associated with the selected project, followed by a short paragraph summarizing the project. Third column is 540px and displays a larger version of the image that the user selects from the thumbnails. Below this is image is a caption and paragraph describing the image.

I'm trying to set up my display using CCK, Imagecache, FileField, ImageField, Taxonomy, and Views.

I've created 2 content types: 1) project_image is a node that contains an image, 2)project_summary is a simple node that just contains a summary of the project.

I created taxonomy vocabularies for each project type. Each vocabulary includes terms that represent each individual project. So when I create a new project_image or project_summary content node, they are assigned a taxonomy term that essentially assigns them to a project.

Using a view called project_summary, I created a Page display that displays the thumbnails in a grid. I also created an Attachment display that displays the project summary and attaches it below the Page display. I added an argument so that only nodes with the given taxonomy term will be displayed. In other words, it only displays the thumbnails and summary of the project that the user selects in the menu.

My menu is a view that just lists the taxonomy terms which link to the project_summary view.

One problem is that I haven't been able to get the Page view into my 2nd column (region). In my page.tpl.php template, my $content variable is located in the 3rd column because that's the main "page". How can I capture the Page display view and assign it to a new variable, instead of $content, so that I can then insert it in the 2nd column in my template? I tried creating this view as a block, and was able to get it into my 2nd column region, but I wasn't able to pass my taxonomy term ID arguments to it.

Otherwise, the view works, but the second problem is that when I click on a thumbnail, it displays the image node (as it should), and the whole view disappears. In other words, the thumbnails and summary should persist in the 2nd column even as the large images in the 3rd column change.

I believe I'm basically trying to do something akin to Frames with the added complexity of trying to pass the taxonomy filters/arguments among the three frames/columns.

I briefly looked at the panels module, but its module page warns that it is pretty unstable at this point.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!
Ben