Research Guides: Architecture Research Basics: Books

Architecture Specific Catalogs

Architecture Association's Library Catalog
The search function covers the AA's library collection, archives, and student theses.
Avery Architectural & Fine Arts LIbrary
Search the collection, including the archives, through CLIO, the Columbia Libraries website.
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Avery is a non-circulating collection and its holdings will not appear in Borrow Direct. An important collection to know about and open to Princeton students. Rare books are designated "Classics" in Avery Library. The Avery also houses an incredible archival collection of approximately 1,500,000 drawings, photographs, letters, and manuscripts relating to architecture and architects. The focus of the collection is American architecture, with a strong emphasis on New York City and its architectural history. Featured archives include: Richard Upjohn, Alexander Jackson Davis, Greene & Greene, Warren & Wetmore, Harold van Buren Magonigle, Stanford White, Wallace K. Harrison, Gordon Bunshaft, Philip Johnson and the archives of the Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company.
Canadian Centre for Architecture
Incl. books, periodicals, artifacts, printed ephemera, & archives' finding aids.
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The CCA holds one of the world’s foremost international research collections of publications, conceptual studies, drawings, plans, models, prints, photographs, related artifacts and ephemera, archives and oral histories of individual architects.
MIT's Rotch Library Collection
BARTON, the online catalog, incl. the Rotch's limited access collection of rare or fragile architecture, art, and urban planning materials.
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Also incl. microfilmed archives of The Architects Collaborative (TAC), founded in 1945 by a group of graduates of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and soon joined by Bauhaus veteran Walter Gropius.
Museum of Modern Art's DADABASE
Searches much of the Auchincloss Study Center for Architecture and Design, whose reference materials relate to the Museum’s collection of design objects, posters, architectural drawings, and models.
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This catalog can cross search MOMA's library collection with all Brooklyn libraries and museums as well as the Frick Reference Library Collection.
Netherlands Architecture Institute
Currently the search interface for the collections of the Netherlands Architecture Institute is under reconstruction, due to be re-released in late 2015. The legacy search function (usable, but no longer maintained) of the NAI searches NAI's archives, library holdings, and model collection.
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The library holdings focus on Dutch and international architecture, urban design, and related design fields such as housing, spatial planning, landscape architecture, and interior architecture. Emphasis is on modern era, from 19th century onwards. Includes an archive for roughly 800 archives and individual collections created by Dutch architects, urban designers, professional associations and training institutes, dating from 1800 - 1970.
Philadelphia Athenaeum Library Catalog
Collection's strengths are architecture and interior design between 1800 and 1945; large trade catalog collections.
RIBA Catalog
incl. the Library's books, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, indexes 300 key architectural periodicals, and features a biographical database of architects.

Search the Library Catalog

Global Catalogs - Finding Books Beyond Princeton

Worldcat (PU Access Only)
A comprehensive library catalog which lists books, DVDs, videos, music scores, recordings, maps and more. Includes materials owned by Princeton University Library and other libraries nearby.
Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog
Connections to many European library catalogs.
Artlibraries.net
Virtual Catalogue for Art History, formerly the VKK, is an international catalogue allowing the integrated retrieval of bibliographic records and from other art historical databases
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Over 8 million records including a high percentage of records for articles in periodicals, conference papers, festschriften, exhibition catalogues and exhibition books, etc., and an increasing percentage of records for archival and photographic materials as well as for online resources.
ArchiRès
Completed in 2014, the ArchiRès Project includes the holdings of architecture libraries of all major French schools, including periodicals, data, and access to student works cataloged within ArchiRès, from throughout the network.

Can't Find It?

Borrow Direct is a rapid, patron-initiated borrowing and lending service for BOOKS offered by Princeton University Library and eleven partner libraries--Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. Visit Borrow Direct's home page for more info about this service.

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Interlibrary Loan (ILL): This service will borrow books, journals, obtain copies of articles, chapters of books, film, music and countless other types of material. This service is much broader in what it obtains for students than Borrow Direct but it is not a rapid service. Click here for more info on ILL.

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