Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library

Rebecca Keary, 01 August 2003 - [ E-mail a Friend ]

Origins

It began with a gift of a mere two thousand volumes and a handful of drawings, donated by Samuel and Mary Putnam Avery in memory of their son, Henry Ogden Avery, a promising young architect who died unexpectedly in 1890 at the age of thirty-eight. With a substantial amount provided for future purchases of books, a great specialist library was born which quickly proceeded to grow and grow.

Columbia was New York State's oldest academic institution, founded in 1754 as King's College, but by the end of the nineteenth century it still did not have its own dedicated campus. In 1894 plans were approved for an elevated site on Morningside Heights, the master plan conceived by Charles F. McKim of the great New York architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. The blossoming architecture library, housed at first in a succession of designated rooms (including a rather unprepossessing location nicknamed by students the 'Maison de Punk'), found a permanent home on the campus thanks to a donation by Henry Ogden's brother, who had survived him.

Although McKim had provided the master plan for the building as part of the larger campus, he retired in 1908 and his protégé, William Kendall, produced a detailed plan for the library, which was built between 1911 and 1912. Designing the Avery Library's home was, of course, something of a challenge as the building had to pass the scrutiny of, and inspire, a procession of architectural tutors and students. Careful proportions and subtle architectural detailing, with reference to drawings held in the collections, resulted in a fine home for the library (and the school of architecture) which, by 1934, had amassed more than thirty thousand architectural volumes.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, American architecture was still very much allied to the European tradition and many young American architectural students (including Henry Ogden Avery) studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris before returning to the States to practise, and even into the twentieth century the traditional French system prevailed. Henry Ogden's parents had wanted to create an unrivalled resource for American architects and architectural students, where they could be inspired by the architecture of the past and trace the evolution of architectural styles, and which could be consulted on their home turf. The acquisition remit of the library also encompassed related subjects such as archaeology, the decorative arts and so on. Objects of inspiration were considered of more value to the architectural student than practical treatises and texts on engineering and construction, so the latter featured little in the original collection.

Collecting fever

The substantial fund provided by the Averys for future purchases was at first administered by a triumvirate of the Professor or Acting Professor of the Architectural Department of the School of Mines (as it was then known), the architect Russell Sturgis, who designed the library's attractive bookplate, which is still used today, and by the Columbia librarian (then George H Baker).\r\n\r\nBaker was followed by a succession of eminent experts and scholars appointed to the post of Avery Librarian, the first of which, appointed in 1895, was the sculptor Edward Robinson Smith. He was followed by a string of energetic librarians, including the respected classical archaeologist, William Bell Dinsmoor (Avery librarian 1920-1926), who invested in archaeological books for the collection. It was Dinsmoor who managed to acquire a then unpublished Serlio manuscript of the 1540s on domestic architecture with the earliest known drawings in existence for the expansion of the Louvre.

Talbot Faulkner Hamlin (1934-36), an architectural historian of note and later Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, ensured that the library's future collection of modern American drawings would be extensive by requesting that architectural firms donated recent material, as well as beginning the systematic indexing of periodicals that resulted in the now indispensable Avery Index used by researchers across the world.

Hamlin and his successor, James G. Van Derpool (1946-1960), both searched high and low for architectural incunabula; amongst their purchases were one of the six known copies of the first English-language architectural printed book (by John Shute), a rare undated first issue of the Grand Marot, and Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii printed in Venice in 1499.

Acquisitions under the architectural historian and Director of the Avery, Adolf K. Placzek (1960-1980), included not only rare classics, such as Androuet du Cerceau's Vues d'optique of 1551 but also drawings by, for example, Louis Sullivan, Hugh Ferriss and Philip C. Johnson. He was assisted by the Avery's chief indexer and rare book bibliographer from 1960 to 1991, Herbert Mitchell, whose passion for collecting rare books took him across the States and throughout Europe. He realised the value of nineteenth century American trade catalogues and view books, building up a vast resource for today's historical preservationists; he also acquired for the library such prizes as drawings by Piranesi for the sanctuary of S. Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, and the rarest of the earliest American architectural books, Abraham Swan's A collection of designs in architecture of 1775.

Much of the prodigious growth of the collections was due to the energy and enthusiasm of these scholars; their acquisitions over the period of more than a century have included some of the rarest and most fascinating architectural books and manuscripts. The Avery's vastly impressive collections also include drawings by the Galli Bibienas, Robert Adam, Isaac Ware as well as some of the earliest American architectural drawings from the eighteenth century, and important collections of the work of Le Corbusier, Sullivan, and Wright. One can only conclude that the graduate students of architecture and design history at Columbia are among the luckiest in the world.

Besides the efforts of the librarians, the Avery was also fortunate in that, unlike the architectural collections of libraries in Europe and elsewhere, the library suffered no losses to its collections and continued to grow during the war and post-war years, and thus soon became the pre-eminent architectural library. While the number of volumes held increased, so did the numbers of staff, students and readers, the increases often prompted by developments within the School of Architecture (such as the introduction of new programmes of study, particularly urban planning and historic preservation), and the pulling power of certain members the Department of Art History and Archaeology, such as Rudolf Wittkower (who became chairman of the department in 1957).

1968 & the "era of the window-sills"

There were inevitably some setbacks, however, most famously in 1968 with the student insurrection at Columbia that made headlines across the world. For several decades the University had pursued a relatively aggressive policy of acquiring real estate for campus expansion from surrounding neighbourhoods, often displacing disadvantaged ethnic minority communities to construct buildings that were, anyway, criticised for their ugliness and poor design.

Few of the planned buildings were actually constructed, but students directed their anger at a new highly controversial gymnasium about to be built on campus. One of the consequences of the resulting protest was an overhaul of the current School of Architecture curriculum, with more emphasis on students' input and platforms for discussion, which, though disruptive, ultimately stimulated debate about modern architectural education in America.

The library's home was also being challenged, as the numbers of books grew to more than one hundred thousand; the end of the 'sixties became known as the "era of the window-sills". Already by the mid-fifties the Avery librarian had been forced to abandon the popular original alcove plan of the reading room, in which readers could study privately, retrieving at least some of the books from open shelves, in favour of expanded stacks.

Going underground

The decision was taken (as at other American universities at the time) to expand underground, and in the same year the chairman of design at the School of Architecture, Alexander Kouzmanoff, began making plans for a new, modern space adjoining the old reading room. His design left the McKim building virtually untouched, with just a skylit staircase leading from the old reading room to the new levels, which housed offices, seminar rooms, reading rooms (including a new rare book reading room), rare book stacks (with environmental controls), space for the Fine Arts library (previously housed elsewhere) and a drawings department.

The library, inevitably, continued to grow - at the moment the count is 350,000 volumes, including the world's most comprehensive collection of architecture and design periodicals, with approximately 600,000 drawings and manuscripts - and space is once again at a premium, prompting a new underground expansion, now under construction. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Study Center for Art and Architecture is scheduled for completion in November 2002, and will provide a new home for the Avery's Drawings & Archives department.

As for the future of the Avery, it seems inevitable that this vast specialist collection will continue to grow not only in volume numbers but in the quality of the archives, through the efforts of the present librarians and curators (headed by the current Avery librarian, Angela Giral) who continue to provide for not only present, but future, researchers in architecture and the fine arts. To the Avery staff's credit, reader services have been largely unaffected despite the various changes in the library's home, although, at present, construction and damp-proofing work is unavoidably restricting access, and prospective readers should visit the Avery's website (at www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/avery.html) for information on current access to rare books and drawings, as well as to consult the Columbia's online library catalogue.

Main sources:

Bergdoll, Barry Mastering McKim's Plan, 1997
Mitchell's Choice: highlights from 20 years of acquisitions for Avery Library (exhibition catalogue, Columbia University 1991)
Placzek, Adolf K. 'The new Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library' in Columbia Library Columns, February 1978
Placzek, Adolf K. & Giral, Angela (eds) Avery's Choice: Five centuries of great architectural books: One hundred years of an architectural library, 1890-1990.
The Avery Library. Selected acquisitions 1960-80. An exhibition in honor of Adolf Placzek (Columbia University 1980).
Van Derpool, James Grote Avery Memorial Architectural Library, 1954