Revealing the RIBA Collections

RIBA champions and supports architects around the world. Established almost 200 years ago, it aims to deliver better buildings and places, stronger communities and a sustainable environment. 

Alongside work in policy, education, practice and public engagement, RIBA cares for one of the world's largest and most significant architectural collections. 

The collection spans books, drawings, photographs, models, artefacts, archives, portraits, medals, coins and audiovisual material. They are the foundation of RIBA's critically acclaimed survey shows and new architect commissions displayed at the galleries in London and Liverpool and loaned to museums around the world.

In 1934 RIBA moved again. This time to the present headquarters at 66 Portland Place. This drawing by the textile and interior designer Miriam Wornum shows the specially-designed library, which featured heated bookcases and bespoke lighting.

The library remains largely unchanged today. It is open to everyone and still holds the majority of RIBA's huge range of books, including its unrivalled collection of rare books. Centred around almost 5,000 volumes published between 1478 and 1840, it includes early editions of Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, and Piranesi.

Another study room was added in 2004 when RIBA partnered with the Victoria & Albert Museum to host the drawings and archive material at the V&A in South Kensington. Part of the collection is on permanent display here alongside small temporary exhibitions, co-curated by the V&A and RIBA. 

RIBA are custodians to almost one million architectural drawings, from sketches and preliminary designs to presentation and technical drawings. These are some of the most popular and famous items, such as this drawing by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.

However, the collection is particularly strong in British architecture, spanning works from Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren to Ernö Goldfinger, Denys Lasdun and Sir Charles Barry, whose drawing for the 'Big Ben' clocktower of the Houses of Parliament is shown here.

RIBA’s photographic collection comprises around 1.5 million images from the earliest days of photography to the present day. It offers an important record of architecture and society, such as photographs of the Louvre, Paris, under construction in the 1840s, and work by some of the most significant architectural photographers of the 20th century: Tony-Ray Jones, John Donat, Edwin Smith, Monica Pidgeon, Edith Tudor Hart and László Moholy-Nagy.

Material in the RIBA Collections doesn't only represent traditional media types. As new technologies and techniques have evolved, the resource of audio-visual and born-digital material has expanded, including audio recordings of events and lectures dating back several decades. 

In this audio recording, former RIBA President Gordon Graham awards the Royal Gold Medal to American design partnership, the Eames Office, in 1979. It was the first time a woman, Ray Eames, was presented with the medal. 

RIBA's collections constantly reveal new insights and fascinating stories. Curators are currently cataloguing the archive of significant post-war architecture practice, Wilson & Partners, which sheds new light on the long, and sometimes troubled, construction of the British Library.

Similarly, RIBA creates records for buildings that have since been lost, like the Debenhams multi-storey car park, designed by Michael Blampied & Partners and photographed here by Christopher Hope-Fitch shortly before it was demolished in 2018. 

Used by students, scholars, architects, planners and heritage campaigners, as well as the wider public, RIBA's Collections continue to play a role in shaping many of our future buildings, towns and cities.

Find out more about the RIBA Collections, browse the catalogue and check visitor information.