Columbia University creates Loeffler embassy archive

Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library announced the creation of The Jane C. Loeffler Collection of Research Papers on American Embassies, a collection donated to the library by gift in 2014 by Washington, D.C. historian/author Jane C. Loeffler. The Avery, in New York City, is among the nation’s leading architectural research libraries. 

Acquiring the collection represents a significant achievement in the library’s on-going effort to document America’s mid-century modernist architecture. Faculty and students at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation also recognize the acquisition as a major asset to the School’s academic programs and see it as a trove likely to generate new research and spawn more seminar projects like the recent GSAPP studio that assessed re-use potential for the U.S. Embassy in Oslo (designed by Eero Saarinen in 1955 and now obsolete). 

The Avery has processed the new archival collection promptly so scholars and others could easily make use of its interviews, notes, government documents, reports, and photographs. A finding aid is already available.