Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
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, does circulate.
Avery Library is named for Henry Ogden Avery, a graduate of Columbia's architecture program and a friend of William Robert Ware, who became the first professor 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 currently receives approximately 900 periodicals, with legacy holdings of approximately 1,900 serial titles. The library's historic first-level reading room is a significant example of work by the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White.
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 Department of Drawings & Archives is among the largest and most significant architectural archives in the world. 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:
- Max Abramovitz
Gordon Bunshaft - Serge Chermayeff
- Ogden Codman, Jr.
- Le Corbusier
- Alexander Jackson Davis
- Delano & Aldrich
- Hugh Ferriss
- Greene and Greene
- Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin
- Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue
- Wallace K. Harrison
- Norman Jaffe
- Philip Johnson
- Ely Jacques Kahn
- Charles R. Lamb and Thomas W. Lamb
- Harold Van Buren Magonigle
- Charles A. Platt
- James Renwick, Jr.
- Emery Roth & Sons
- Louis Sullivan
- Richard Upjohn
- Stanford White
- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Warren & Wetmore
- Shadrach Woods
The Archives also holds the records of the the Empire State Building,
Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company, the New York Architectural
Terra-Cotta Co., and
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.
External links
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