Avery/GSAPP Architectural Plans & Sections Collection Adds 10,000 Images to its Digital Archive

The Visual Resources Collection (VRC) at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning (GSAPP) has added on a slew of 10,000 images as the second publishing phase and completion of the Avery/GSAPP Architectural Plans & Sections Collection. This collaborative endeavor, carried out with Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library (the largest architecture library in the world) and New York-based nonprofit Artstor, is part of a two-part process of making a total of 20,000 images of architectural drawings, diagrams, and photographs available to students through Artstor’s database over the course of two years.

This initiative was started in the summer of 2014 by three student curators within VRC, a student facility at Columbia, who worked with Avery Library—making it the first project between the two organizations. The first half of the images were published on March 30.

Depicting mainly 20^th century Modernism, the collection now contains 20,000 projects from 60 countries with the addition of the new images, which are all available online for the first time. In them, students will find nearly 100 projects by Le Corbusier, 100 projects in South America, and over 125 in Japan. This is the result of 30 students within the GSAPP program across different disciplines within the graduate school that organized the images and metadata to ultimately deliver the product to Artstor.