The CCA holds one of the world’s foremost international research collections of publications, conceptual studies, drawings, plans, models, prints, photographs, related artefacts and ephemera, archives and oral histories of individual architects.

The Collection now comprises over half a million examples that testify to the diverse ways in which architecture has been imagined, conceived, observed, and transformed for the past six centuries.

Search the CCA Collection:

Library Catalogue (books and periodicals, vertical files, audiovisual items, artefacts , printed ephemera, archives and collections and their finding aids)

Collection Online (prints and drawings, photographs, models, artefacts, archives and collections and their finding aids)

Search both the Library Catalogue and Collection Online to ensure that you identify documents relevant to your research.

Researchers may consult the Collection in the Library Reading Room by contacting Collection Reference. For information about reproductions from the Collection, contact Rights and Reproductions.

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photographs

Thomas Keith: Fragments of Edinburgh in the Olden Time

An album of 100 photographs, entitled Fragments of Edinburgh in the Olden Time is the largest known printed work of Thomas Keith (1827-1895... read more
about photographs

prints and drawings

Drawing Instruments: Pantograph

The pantograph, an apparatus for making enlarged or reduced drawings, first appeared in the early seventeenth century, its invention credited... read more
about prints and drawings

archives

Shim-Sutcliffe Architects Archive

Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, based in Toronto, is internationally known for the firm’s rigorous and engaging design, sensitivity to site, and... read more
about the archives

publications

Edward Craig Theatre Collection

Edward (Carrick) Craig and his father, the eminent stage designer Edward Gordon Craig compiled this collection comprised of books (about 75... read more
about publications

artefacts and media

Kindergarten Toys

Kindergarten, or "children's garden" was first developed in Germany in the 1830s by Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852). By the end of the century... read more
about artefacts and media

selections from CCA collection

The Great East River Suspension Bridge

Before the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, a New York toy-manufacturer, Stirn & Lyon, rendered this nineteenth-century engineering... read more

A Children's Model of the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery

Made between 1840 and 1880 in the town of Zagorsk near Moscow - a centre of Russian toymaking for several centuries - the model is a miniature... read more