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The Frances L. Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design has served the needs of the teaching faculty and students of the University, and of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning design scholars worldwide, since the beginning of the architecture program in 1900. During that period the library has had two different homes, and the collections have grown through a combination of purchased acquisitions and gifts from faculty and alumni of the School. The library has been an integral part of the School throughout its history, working closely with faculty and students to support design education.
The history behind the library
Like many libraries in 201 1, the Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is in the midst of change and reinvention. Looking back at its history, one could say that Loeb Library has had many reinventions over the last hundred years, and its beginnings are inextricably entwined with the development of the once separate departments that were in 1936 merged into the Graduate School of Design.
A look at the history of the School will give us some insight into the history of the library. The Department of Architecture was founded in 1895 by Herbert Langford Warren. The Department was first housed in Hunt Hall, where the original Fogg Art Museum had been before its move across the street. The library for the Architecture Department was begun in 1902. It was considered a reference library: '...most of the books have been chosen with regard to the work of the drawing-room, and especially to facilitate the practical work in design'.' This is an important concept, because this understanding of the purpose of a design school library has held true through the last hundred years, and is still how we understand the function and focus of the Library at the Design School today.
In 1899, Nelson Robinson offered Harvard a generous gift in memory of his son, Nelson Robinson, Jr., in the form of an endowment to the architecture program. He also endowed a landscape architecture program in memory of then Harvard President Charles Eliot's son, Charles (1859-1897), and Olmsted partner, designer, and environmental advocate before his premature death, and thus, in 1900, Harvard began the first degree-granting graduate program...