Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library

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The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library is one of twenty-five libraries in the Columbia University Library System located on the campus of Columbia University in the City of New York. It is the largest architecture library in the United States. Serving Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the Department of Art History, Avery Library collects books and periodicals in architecture, historic preservation, art history, painting, sculpting, graphic arts, decorative arts, city planning, real estate, and archaeology. The architectural and fine arts collection are non-circulating. The Ware Collection, mainly books on urban planning and real estate development, do circulate.

Avery Library is named for Henry Ogden Avery, one of New York's promising young architects in the late 19th century and a friend of William Robert Ware, who founded the School of Architecture at Columbia in 1881. A few weeks after Avery's early death in 1890, his parents established the library as a memorial to their son. They offered his collection of 2,000 books, mostly in architecture, archaeology, and the decorative arts, many of his original drawings, as well as funds to round out the book collection, and an endowment to help the library grow. The Library now holds more than 400,000 volumes and receives approximately 1,900 periodicals. The library's historic first-level reading room is a significant example of work by the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White.

[edit] Collection

Avery Library's collection in architecture is among the largest in the world and includes such highlights such as the first Western printed book on architecture, De re aedificatoria (1485), by Leone Battista Alberti, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and classics of modernism by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.

In addition, Avery's Drawings and Archives Department is among the largest and most significant architectural archives in North America. Its holdings include more than one million architectural drawings, photographs, manuscripts, business records, audio-visual recordings, and other related materials, primarily relating to New York City and the surrounding region.

Among the notable architects represented in the collection are:

The Archives also holds the records of the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company, the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Co., and the Empire State Building, as well as drawings by architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss, papers of Douglas Haskell, editor of the Architectural Forum, and significant holdings of work by architectural photographers C. D. Arnold, Samuel H. Gottscho, and Joseph W. Molitor.

[edit] Avery Index

Avery Library is also home to the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, a program of the Getty Research Institute. Begun at Avery in 1934, the Index provides citations to articles in approximately 300 current and over 1,000 retrospective architectural and related periodicals, with primary emphasis on architectural design and history as well as archaeology, landscape architecture, interior design, furniture and decorative arts, garden history, historic preservation, urban planning and design, real estate development, and environmental studies. The Index also includes a large body of obituaries of architects.