One of Avery Library’s strengths is in the periodical literature of architecture. The collections include complete runs of important periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including American Architect and Building News, Architectural Sketchbook (Boston), The Brickbuilder, Le Revue Generale de l’architecture et des travaux publique, Casabella, Oppositions, Pencil Points, Gatepac, L’Esprit Nouveau, Wendingen and De Stijl, and a growing collection of pre-war avant-garde European journals.

The Avery Classics Collection is the rare book collection of Avery Library and one of the largest architectural rare book collections in the world. It contains approximately 40,000 printed volumes published over seven centuries, from Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485) to Ólafur Elíasson’s Your House (2006). Avery Classics also has important holdings of graphic suites, periodicals, manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, and printed ephemera. Its strengths reflect the library’s original subject scope, established by Avery’s founders in 1890, that is architecture, archaeology, urban planning, and the decorative arts of Western Europe and America. Avery Classics still actively collects in all of these historical areas. Responding to recent directions in scholarship, Avery Classics has also begun to collect modernist publications from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Japan. All Avery Library books that were produced before 1801 are in Avery Classics. The collection also includes significant editions of major works created after 1800, as well as works that possess distinctive physical characteristics, such as special bindings, exceptional printing, innovative design, autograph inscriptions, or other signs of notable former ownership. Significant ephemeral collections within Avery Classics are: the Trade Catalog Collection, which is one of the largest collections of catalogs of the American building trades anywhere; the American View Book Collection, which includes books, pamphlets, and brochures that document cities, towns, and buildings throughout the United States; the American Dream Collection which documents the subdivision of the American landscape into suburban and commercial agri-parcels; and the Real Estate Brochures Collection focused on residential buildings in New York City. Master’s theses in GSAPP’s Historic Preservation and Urban Planning programs prior to 2012 are also included in Avery Classics. Since 2012, the theses are digital and physical copies are no longer housed in Avery Classics.

The Avery Drawings & Archives Collection consists of drawings and architectural records documenting American architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With more than nine hundred archives catalogued by architect, the holdings in Drawings & Archives include a diverse range of original and reprographic drawings, photographs, building and project files, business papers, correspondence, diaries, scrapbooks, and films, as well as faculty and personal papers. Major architects represented include Louis Sullivan, Philip Johnson, Felix Candela, Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz, Shadrach Woods, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The built environment of New York is strongly represented in the collection and includes material related to skyscrapers, apartments, zoning, and significant urban designs, such as Rockefeller Center, the United Nations, and Lincoln Center. The largest collection is the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. Jointly acquired with the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, it is one of the most comprehensive archives of an American architect. The collection also holds large numbers of student Beaux-Arts drawings and a significant photography collection that includes the Empire State Building photographs by Lewis Hine. Experimental and contemporary practices, such as Douglas Darden and Ant Farm, are a growing collection focus, together with practices that address questions of social and environmental justice. 

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds two collections of note related to architecture. The Joseph Urban Papers, 1872--1933 collection contains watercolor renderings, sketches, technical drawings (ground plans, elevations, and details), photographs, glass plate and acetate negatives, scrapbooks, set models, and some related papers covering Urban's career in Vienna and New York as an architect, set designer, decorator, and illustrator. The Frederick Fried Coney Island Collection, 1847--2001 documents the history of the amusements industry and the public culture of Coney Island (Brooklyn, New York). Included are photographic materials, drawings, and blueprints. RBML also holds the papers of art historians Meyer Schapiro (1904--1996) and Rudolf Wittkower (1923--1978), as well as landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke (1892--1982).