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The Project Records series of the Gunnar Birkerts collection contains the architect's textual files and conceptual drawings associated with 122 of the buildings and projects which he has designed over his 50-plus-year career. Unlike the Gunnar Birkerts and Associates Collection, which houses all of the records and drawings associated with fourteen of his firm's buildings, the Gunnar Birkerts Collection is significant for its highly personal representation of the architect's creative process. This last series in the collection brings together over 1800 sketches in his own hand, many documenting the moment of a building's conception on tracing paper, shirt cardboard or the memo pad of an Italian hotel. In Birkert's words:

That is the moment that I call the organic synthesis -- when all the factors affecting the personality of the building come together in the right magnitudes and the building starts to grow like a plant. The first drawing isn't necessarily pretty, but after you analyze it you see that everything the building needs is in it because it was created by your mind - which as full of everything you needed to know. Sometimes I call these drawings "blobs," but they are really the representation of my brainwaves. An architecture critic would call them seminal ideas. [Gunnar Birkerts, Gunnar Birkerts: Process and Expression in Architectural Form (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 34.

Birkerts' textual and visual project records are arranged by building in chronological order from the time of his association with Eero Saarinen in the 1950s through the turn of the twenty-first century. The conceptual sketches and schematic design and design development drawings in the collection are described individually, and 282 of them are linked in this finding aid to online digital images scanned from 4x5 color transparencies of the original drawings. Researchers can click on the "view image" link next to the descriptions of these drawings in the to access these images of 58 of Birkerts; buildings. This will open an new browser window and display the image stored in the Bentley Historical Library Image Bank. It is also possible to search the Image Bank Directly. Birkerts retained the originals of a number of the conceptual drawings. Descriptions of these items are provided in the contents list with a link to a digital copy.