Contemporary Architectural Drawings: Donations to the Avery Library Centennial Drawings Archive

Architectural drawings today may not be drawings at all, but three-dimensional trips through buildings in video time.

Contemporary Architectural Drawings: Donations to the Avery Library Centennial Drawings Archive, marks the 100th anniversary and the start of the second century of collecting for Columbia's world famous Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. The exhibition focuses on how computer technology aids design and drafting and the visualization of the final, and features a full-dimensional project demonstrated on video.

In addition to video exhibits, 150 drawings from the new archive of more than 320 works by 120 contemporary American and international architects, donated in celebration of the Avery centennial, will be on view in two galleries on the University's Morningside Heights campus: the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

The drawings are permanent gifts to the library by the architects, among them the best known of our age.

Thanks to digital video imaging, viewers will be able to take an illusionary stroll through a Paris envisioned by Le Corbusier in his unrealized 1925 "Plan Voisin de Paris," shown here in an excerpt from a 1987 film by Jacques Barsac. And they will see in a video demonstration by the New York- and Minneapolis-based firm Ellerbe Becket the steps taken to program and produce computer-generated plans for a hospital in Oslo, Norway (Peter Pran, project architect).

Included in the show are two-dimensional drawings by such noted architects as, in the United States, Kevin Bone, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, I. M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Richard Meier, James Stewart Polshek, Paul Rudolph, Robert A. M. Stern and Susana Torre, and, internationally, by Mario Botta, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Aldo Rossi, Bernard Tschumi, Colin St. John Wilson and others.

Drawings of domestic, corporate, and urban planning projects range from traditional pencil or ink sketches and fully finished watercolors to the current standard of ink or pencil on mylar or paper. Some have been made in whole or in part with computer graphics, a method now used by architects with increasing frequency. They represent designs for projects throughout the United States and in Spain, Japan, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany, France, Mexico and other countries.

A few drawings, such as Natalie de Blois's 1943 sketch of Morningside Park in Manhattan, are from earlier eras, but most date from 1985 to the present. Included are a Graves drawing of one of his projects for the Whitney Museum in New York; a whimsical proposal for a casino on Alcatraz Island by Ace Architects (1988, Lucia Howard and David Weingarten, principals); Bone's plan for a freeway for Pershing Square redevelopment in Los Angeles (1986); Botta's sketch of an elevation for a bank in Lugano, Switzerland (1985): a sketch in red marker on paper by Pei for the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1968); a rendering in pencil on mylar by Pelli for the Miglin-Beitler "sky" Tower in Chicago (1990), and a drawing by Tschumi, now dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, of a "folle" for Parc de la Villette in Paris.

One of the world's great architectural institutions, the library was founded by Samuel Putnam Avery, a prominent New York city print dealer, as a memorial to his son, Henry, an architect who died of tuberculosis at the age of 38. From the initial gift of 2,000 books from Henry's library and his drawings, the Avery Library has grown to encompass 250,000 volumes, 10,000 rare books and 400, 000 architectural drawings and archival records. It includes collections of works by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hugh Ferriss, McKim, Mead and White, Harrison and Abramovitz, Philip Johnson, Gordon Bunschaft and Luis Barragan.

Joining their ranks now are the architects in the current exhibition, "the first step into the next century of collecting," said Janet Parks, Avery's Curator of Drawings and curator of the exhibition. "The strength of the Avery Drawings Collections lies in the depth and richness of its holdings in American architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries. These new drawings are by architects who are the subject of the great architectural books of the present and the future. The Centennial Archive reveals a great deal about issues important to the architectural profession today."

Ms. Parks and Angela Giral, the Avery Librarian, began a year ago to solicit submissions for a collection commemorating the centennial celebration. "The magnitude of the response to our appeal for donations from architects throughout the world has been a heartwarming recognition of the widespread distinction achieved by the name of Avery during its first century of existence," Ms. Giral says in a preface to the illustrated catalogue of the exhibition being published in April by Pomegranate Press. "Thanks to the generosity of the architects we can today have a proud celebration of the art of architectural drawing with this first exhibition that joins the two new dynamic galleries on campus and positions Avery once more at the nexus between the historians and the practitioners of architecture."

This is the second major exhibition held by the library during its centennial year. To celebrate the accomplishments of Avery's first century, landmark architectural publications from its holdings were shown at Columbia in October.

The Wallach Gallery is administered by the Office of Art Properties of the Department of Art History and Archaeology, and the Ross Gallery by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The preparation of the exhibition was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation of Chicago. Professor Barry Bergdoll of the Department of Art History and Archaeology is faculty liaison for the exhibition.