Collections : [Avery Drawings & Archives]

This collection primarily contains architectural drawings, correspondence, business records, and a small number of photographs related to the projects of Emery Roth & Sons and its subsidiary entities. A large portion of the entities are represented only in the Office Records series and are identified as such. Some projects on which Emery Roth & Sons acted as architect of record are not represented in this collection, most notably the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

This collection is photograph archive of the works of architectural photographer George Cserna. Images include interior and exterior shots of prominent New York buildings primarily during the 1960s. The collection has been arranged alphabetically by the client or architect of the building. Some of George Cserna's most notable work in this collection includes photographs of Ulrich Franzen's Agronomy Building, Emerson Hall, and Goddard Library at Cornell University; Haines, Lundberg, and Waehler's U.S. Trust Building and Schering-Plough Headquarters; Victor Lundy's I. Miller Store and IBM Headquarters; and I. M. Pei's John Hancock Tower, Mount Royal Bank and Ville Marie Complex, and MIT Chemistry Building. The collection also contains photographs of exhibitions and openings at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Responsive Eye and Toward a Rational Automobile. Finally, the collection has photographic portraits of notable persons including John dos Passos, W.H. Auden, and William Faulkner.

The collection is made up of architectural drawings for various projects undertaken by firms/architects such as Skidmore, Owings& Merrill, Warren Gran & Associates, John Carl Warnecke & Associates, Eggers Group, INC, Carson, Lundin & Shaw, and Alfred Easton Poor during the 1960s to the 1980s. Projects represented in this collection include, among others, 1st City National Bank of Houston, Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, Pepsi Cola HQ Auditorium, Olympia Centre in Chicago, US Steel Building, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co., International Arrival Wing at JFK Airport, Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills, CA and Newport Beach, CA, Foreign Trade Bank of Iran Banking Headquarters, Hilton Casino in Atlantic City, 445 Fifth Avenue, John Hancock Tower in Boston, and the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building. The majority of the drawings are blue line prints, however, there are some color renderings.

The collection is made up of 2,967 architectural drawings drawn primarily between 1947 and 1998. Jan Hird Pokorny is the primary creator for the majority of the drawings, however, additional creators represented in the collection include Paul P. Cret, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Ferdinand Gottlieb, and Felix Augenfeld. Projects include many alterations to various East Coat residences, Columbia University's Lewisohn Hall, Centenary Junior College in Hackettstown, N.J, Herbert H. Lehman College in the Bronx, and Norwalk Railroad Station renovations among others.

Jock Pottle is a photographer of architectural models, active during the 1980s through early 2000s. The collection documents his practice photographing architectural models for large and small firms, for American as well as international projects. The collection contains only photographic materials, including photographs, negatives, transparencies, slides, and born-digital image files. The arrangement of the collection follows Pottle's system of organization by is arranged by project number, or by client or project name. A partial file listing has been created, but the collection is underprocessed.

The bulk of this collection consists of more than 22,000 black and white photographic negatives and more than 10,600 black and white photographic prints documenting commercial, institutional, religious, and residential architecture throughout the United States, with particular emphasis on sites in the mid-Atlantic region. These images date from the mid-1930s to Molitor's retirement in the mid-1980s, with the great majority of images created between 1946 and 1980. Also included in the collection are images of landscapes, industrial design, portraits, and events of personal significance to Molitor. In some select cases, color prints, color negatives, color transparencies, and 35mm slides are also available in addition to or instead of the black and white negatives and prints. Researchers are also advised that documents in this collection indicate that when faced with a lack of storage space in 1973, Molitor contacted clients to return inactive negatives that they had comissioned before 1955. In at least some cases, those clients declined to accept their negatives and Molitor subsequently destroyed the images. Thus, this collection has lacunae in the negatives series.

Collection consists of sixty original architectural and furniture drawings for Lever House in New York City, drawn between 1950 and 1952. Most sheet are graphite on paper, with a smaller group of sepia diazo prints with extensive graphite annotations. All sheets were treated by a paper conservator and are now encapsulated in polyester film.

The collection primarily consists of negatives, transparencies, prints of architectural models arranged chronological by project number.