The focus of the Architectural Archives is on work from the 20th century. It comprises the estates and collections of architects, engineers, landscape planners, theoreticians and photographers.
A set of 179 drawings and two models, including a cork model by Roman architect Antonio Chichi, has survived from the late eighteenth century.
The work of architects such as Friedrich Gilly, Martin Friedrich Rabe and Heinrich Gentz reflect the neo-classical architecture in Prussia.
The Architectural Archives contains a uniquely rich collection of expressionist watercolours and sketches from the archives of Hugo Häring, Hans Scharoun, the Luckhardt Brothers and Alfons Anker as well as the archives of brothers Bruno Taut and Max Taut, the collections of Erich Mendelsohn and the artists’ community of the “Gläserne Kette”.
The archives of émigrés from 1933–1945, such as those of Konrad Wachsmann, Adolf Rading, Thilo Schoder, Harry Rosenthal and Julius Posener offer an insight into the work of architects outside Germany.
With bequests, for example, the archives of Hans Scharoun, Paul Baumgarten, Werner Düttmann, Werner Hebebrand, Helmut Hentrich and many more, the Architecture Archives documented developments in modern architecture from 1900 in Imperial Germany into the 1980s in West Germany.
After 1989, these holdings were expanded with archives from East German architects, including Hermann Henselmann, Kurt Junghanns and Heinz Graffunder.
Architects active within Germany and internationally, including many Academy members, have donated their work as archives, and such donations are still continuing today. In this way, after 2000, the Architecture Archives acquired, for instance, such archives as those of Kurt Ackermann, Hans Busso von Busse, Szyszkowitz+Kowalski Architectural Studio, Joachim and Margot Schürmann, Peter von Seidlein and Gustav Peichl, as well as the archives of the engineers Jörg Schlaich and Rudolf Bergermann and landscape architects Günter Nagel, Valentien+Valentien and many other leading modern architects.
The collections also represent developments in the twenty-first century, among them are works by, Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, Manfred Ortner, Arno Brandlhuber and gmp Architekten. The Architectural Archives does not solely collect architectural documents relating to Berlin, but also includes architectural plans of major historical importance internationally.
Although the Akademie der Künste’s first recorded architectural documents date from the eighteenth century, the systematic acquisition of materials in the Architectural Archives only began under architect Hans Scharoun, the first post-war President of the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin. The Hugo Häring Archive, established in 1958, was the first architectural estate acquired by the Academy.
In 1961, the Academy members decided to systematically collect documents from leading living and deceased architects and from Academy members. The holdings grew significantly, above all, when the Academy took over the Hans Scharoun Archive after his death in 1972. With about 30,000 architectural plans and designs, and 60 linear metres of written documents and photographs, the Hans Scharoun Archive is still one of the largest and most important single Archives in the Architectural Archives.
Until 1993, the Academy members and the particular Secretary of the Architecture Section shared the task of maintaining and publishing the architectural holdings. In that year, the Architectural Archives then became an independent department within the Academy. Since then, the holdings have been continually expanded.
One major impetus in the acquisition policy came from the decision to include architectural drawings of designs never realised and never appearing in the urban landscape. By preserving such unrealised designs in archives of architects, the Architectural Archives significantly contributes to architectural research.
Ever since the Akademie der Künste first started collecting, documents have always been viewed in the context of their creation. In this spirit, in order to offer an insight into the history of architectural projects, the Architectural Archives preserves all the documents created in the process of planning and realisation, from sketches and drawings to architects’ plans and models as well as correspondence between those involved, photos of finished works and, last but not least, publications.