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Rows of cardboard boxes filled with building material samples in the library at the University of Oregon‘s Portland center don’t look like much – yet.

But head librarian Karen Munro has grand plans. Soon the samples will be organized and displayed on shelves to serve as visual and tactile references for architecture students and Portland-area design professionals.

“The challenge is taking it from a big pile of stuff to a collection with some order,” Munro said. “We know a materials collection is pretty important for architecture students … It really comes out of the curriculum – the professors asking students to handle materials.”

There is an extensive materials library at the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts in Eugene, but the Portland satellite campus lacked a similar counterpart, she said. As a result, the UO Portland Library and Learning Commons about a year ago began accepting material sample donations from architecture firms and building supply manufacturers.

This spring, the collection got a large boost when MulvannyG2 Architecture decided to donate its Portland materials library to the university. The firm is closing its Portland office and so its library needed a new home, MulvannyG2 spokeswoman Jessica Biel said.

“We’ve had a long-standing relationship with (the University of Oregon),” she said. “It was the perfect place to donate that.”

MulvannyG2’s donation fueled a renewed push to establish a materials library at the Portland campus, said Nathan Erwin, a graduate architecture student and co-president of the university’s Portland Student Action Council.

“We got this influx of materials (and) it kind of sparked that this was something that we could expand on,” he said. “Because we got this big donation, it really opened up our eyes.”

Unlike the Eugene materials library, which has a heavy interior design focus, the Portland collection will cater to students studying urban and sustainable architecture, Munro said. Instead of fabrics and other interior materials, much of the Portland collection consists of exterior finishes and wood, glass, stone and metal building components.

Physical access to these types of materials will prove invaluable to Portland architecture students, especially as they complete their thesis projects, Erwin said.

“It really takes a lot of research,” he said. “Having that (library) downstairs helps students not play guess and check. A lot of times with renderings, the materials don’t come through as they would in real life.”

Despite advances in digital rendering software, associate architecture professor Nancy Cheng said she emphasizes to her students the advantage of physically handling and comparing building materials.

“In order to understand what your design would look like, it’s really great to touch and feel the materials that you will be using,” she said. “We want to make sure what we’re designing is appropriate. Having samples gives us a sense of the physical properties as well as the aesthetic properties.”

Shelving and other furniture to accommodate the Portland materials collection should arrive later this summer, Munro said. Unlike the library books, students will continue to borrow the samples using the honor system instead of formally checking them out.

Munro will visit building materials libraries at other universities – perhaps the University of Texas at Austin, California Polytechnic State University and Harvard University – to research displays.

“It requires different expertise than managing, say a book or movie collection,” she said. “We are doing it here really informally at the moment.”

Many architecture firms have their own materials collections, but Portland-area architects may turn to the UO library, which is open to the public, to find samples that they don’t have in-house, Munro said.

“It would be potentially good resource beyond the school,” she said. “We’ll see if this collection sparks some extra interest.”