The museum was founded in 1995 as a result of the expansion of the Department of Fine Arts’ Cabinet for Architecture and Urban Planning, whose rich collection of archival materials became the initial collection of the museum. The museum collects, stores, and explores relevant documentation and data from the history of Croatian architecture, and puts special emphasis on collecting materials from the period of Croatian Modernism, i.e., from the turn of the twentieth century until the present. The collection has about 18,000 copies of various archival materials: plans, drawings, models, photographs, slides, correspondence, and other documents related to the history of Croatian architecture.