Libraries

A number of library resources serve the needs of the School's students, faculty, and staff.

Reading Room

The Architecture Reading Room serves as a circulating library, study space, and materials library within the Lasserre Building. The Reading Room maintains 24 active subscriptions to a selection of key architecture and design journals. The monograph and journal collection reflects the courses of instruction, student interests, faculty research, and studies abroad. The collection is composed of approximately 3,000 monographs, 20,000 slides, 1,700 graduating projects, 800 product samples, and a small archival collection. Recommended readings are kept at the reading room desk on reserve. In 2007, through the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, SALA started to develop a Digital Image Collection that now consists of 5,200 images.

The Architecture Reading Room is located in the basement of the Lasserre Building. A small collection of key landscape architecture related books and student graduate design projects – approximately 400 monographs, 2 journal titles, and 50 graduating projects – is located in the administrative office of the Landscape Architecture program. 

Art + Architecture + Planning, UBC Library

Art + Architecture + Planning, UBC Library (AArP) houses the primary architecture and landscape architecture collection on campus. Located on the third and fourth floors of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the collection – numbering over 220,000 items, including over 38,000 books and 180 journals (in print and online) on or related to architecture – continues to grow.

The collection includes reference books like the Mies van der Rohe Archive, the Walter Gropius Archive, the Burnham Index to Architectural Literature, the Louis I. Kahn Archive, and the Le Corbusier Archive, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. The AArP collection also includes multitudes of items with an emphasis on Canadian artists and architects, community and regional planning in Vancouver and beyond, and several picture collections. Although many items can be borrowed, journals, reference materials, and rare books in the AArP collection are for Library use only.

UBC Library also provides its users with access to major architecture journal indexes and databases such as the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, Design and Applied Arts Index, Art Index and Art Retrospective, the Bibliography of the History of Art, and the image database ARTstor.