Historic American Buildings Survey Celebrates 75 Years as Invaluable Design Resource

by Steve Freeman

Summary: Whether for an actual historic restoration project or browsing through Americana design ideas, architects often include a visit to the Library of Congress via the Internet into their programming activities. Three online collections—the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS)—offer an extensive collection of high-quality drawings, photos, and notes on several thousand locally and nationally recognized structures. Recently feted for its 75th anniversary, the HABS collection, with its own ties to the AIA, is a valued resource for architects in any region of the nation.

How do you . . . augment your design by using the largest single public archive of architectural, engineering, and landscape technical drawings?

LINKS

Search the HABS collection

National Park Service Standards

PODCAST

Presentations from HABS
Podcast presentations at the HABS symposium can be viewed online

KNOWNET

See what the AIA Historic Resources Committee is up to.

PICTURES

Drawings from the HABS collection on the 17th-century Mulford House, East Hampton, N.Y, for which, in 1983, Weber received the inaugural Charles E. Peterson Prize, which recognizes the best set of parametric drawings submitted by an architecture student.

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For HABS, It’s 75 Years

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Need Greek Revival details? Pursuing a job to make a green retrofit to a favorite historic hotel? The Library of Congress can possibly help. Its HABS collection offers online visitors authoritative and high-quality drawings of interiors and exteriors that can be perused online or downloaded. Many entries also include large-format TIF photos of the structures, color transparencies, and other basic documentation.

In a few clicks on the Internet, an architect can access the largest public digitized collection of historic U.S. structures and spaces that exists. In-person visits to the collection in the nation’s capital are also possible. The Web site’s search engine is the gateway to the first federal historic preservation program, which today contains 38,500 standardized surveys that are searchable by keyword, geographic identifiers, styles, or materials used.

“It’s a very useful tool, good for renovation, construction, and design development,” said Marilyn Ibach, reference specialist in architecture of the library’s Prints and Photographs Division.“ Area, local, and state preservation groups may provide information and even drawings needed by architects doing research, but this online collection is a must-visit site with its 62,000 downloadable, rights-free drawings. It’s fast, free, and convenient.”

Seamless seques to HAER and HALS
The search engine also seamlessly accesses the HAER and HALS collections. Together, the three sites cover human environmental development from Pre-Columbian times to the 20th century. As for HABS, “it’s not a complete list, but it’s the only list that exists—the only site for drawings,” said Anne Weber, AIA, a speaker at the recent HABS symposium marking the anniversary.

“It’s the only place to go to look for graphic documentation of historic buildings, added Weber. “Many are really beautiful and it’s interesting to leaf through them. It’s certainly valuable to architects, because there are more and more historic buildings every day, and the amount of work [you can access] dealing with existing buildings, whether or not they are historic, is a huge plus for architects.”

In 1983, Weber was the first recipient of the Department of Interior’s Charles E. Peterson Prize, which recognizes the best set of parametric drawings submitted by an architecture student. Her entry—a hand-drawn treatment of the 17th Century Mulford House in East Hampton, N.Y—was completed while she was a student at Columbia University. Today, she is senior associate for Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects in Princeton, N.J.

Connections to the AIA and architects
The AIA played a key role in the creation of HABS by partnering with the Library of Congress and the National Park Service in 1933 to launch the collection.