Collections : [Avery Drawings & Archives]

The materials that comprise the Vertical File have been collected and added to from a variety of sources by former Avery Librarians. The vertical file contains clippings, pamphlets, reprints, and other miscellaneous materials relating to persons, places, organizations, and topical subjects relating to architecture, housing, and city planning. The purpose of the vertical file was to arrange and store small items, memorabilia, and ephemeral material on a variety of topics to facilitate access by researchers. For the most part, the vertical file contains printed items only. Manuscript material and other unique items were, generally, not placed in the vertical file. In some cases, manuscript material has been removed from the Vertical File and placed in its corresponding collection.

This collections contains the professional research, writing, publications, and correspondence produced and collected by Rattner through her study of the architect James Renwick, Jr. The bulk of Rattner's research addresses the life and works of Renwick, but other research topics represented in her papers range from the Renwick family genealogy to the institutional architecture of New York City. Types of research material include personal research notes (in notecard format, both typed and holograph), correspondence (1963-2001), newspaper and magazine clippings, Xerox copies of archival material and secondary sources, transcribed articles and correspondence, brochures from historic sites, photographs and slides of buildings and sites, sketches, historic structure inventory forms, landmark nomination forms, landmark designation reports, and postcards.

This collection is composed primarily of correspondence, memoranda, course material, photographs, drawings and slides. The collection is broken down into personal and academic papers. The academic papers pertain mainly to Colquhoun's career as a writer and theoretician and professor at Princeton University's School of Architecture. The personal papers consist mainly of correspondences with friends and family, as well as notebooks, which Colquhoun kept from the 1940s. The visual materials (photographs and drawings) straddle the two categories. Many of the photographs were taken by Colquhoun himself, to be used later in his teaching, while the drawings consist of both student work and reproductions of works from his practice with John Miller. For the majority of the collection, Colquhoun's folder titles have been maintained and the material has been arranged chronologically. The collection is arranged into four series.