ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN COLLECTION

The Architecture & Design Collection (ADC) was established in 1963 by noted scholar and U.C. Santa Barbara professor, David Gebhard (1927-1996). Today, the ADC contains 110 collections and includes more than 850,000 drawings, 200,000 photographs and negatives, 1300 linear feet of manuscript material. Featuring materials dating from 1890 to the present, the ADC reflects the diversity of California’s twentieth-century designed and built heritage.

Holdings include the work of pioneering modernists active in California before World War II such as Irving J. Gill (1870-1936), Rudolph M. Schindler (1887-1953), Kem Weber (1889-1963), and J. R. Davidson (1889-1977). The archives also reflect efforts to develop a regional identity based on period revivals, as embodied in the work of Myron Hunt (1868-1952) and Roland Coate, Sr. (1890-1958), George Washington Smith (1876-1930), Lutah Maria Riggs (1896-1984), and Robert B. Stacy-Judd (1884-1975).

Much of the ADC documents California’s "second generation" of modernists, active between 1945 and 1980. Designs range from Cliff May’s (1908-1998) hacienda-inspired ranch houses, prefabricated dwellings by Gregory Ain (1908-1988), and innovative Case Study houses by Thornton Abell (1906-1984), Edward Killingsworth (1911-2004), and Whitney R. Smith (1911-2002), to environmentally responsive school buildings by Maynard Lyndon (1907-1999) as well as futuristic structures by Albert Frey (1903-1998) and Paul Lászlò (1900-1993).

The Architecture and Design Collection will close July 1, 2011 because the entire Arts Building is undergoing seismic retrofit and renovation. The ADC will re-open March 2012 in the 1400 wing of the Arts Building. Note that, because the collection must be packed and moved offsite this Fall, we will be able to provide only limited reference assistance by phone and email during this period.