IN 1956, THE LATE JOHN HARRIS, a maverick and self-educated young architectural historian got a job at the Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) as a junior curator of its architectural drawings. By his account, the collection was in a mess, partly housed in a hut on the roof and partly in a basement boiler room.
In 1960, he became its curator and began putting the collection in order, making acquisitions from dealers and at auction as well as from RIBA members, and from 1968, overseeing the publication of a systematic
