Architecture

The Huntington’s principal architecture and planning holdings relate to Southern California. As the result of focused collecting activity from the late 1970s on, the Library now holds approximately 35,000 plans, renderings, photographs, and project records from around 1900 through the 1950s. Chief among these are archives for some of the region’s most important architects: Morgan, Walls & Clements, Wallace Neff, James Dolena, Florence Yoch and Lucile Council, Edward Warren Hoak, the Foss Construction Company, and Samuel Lunden.

Important material related to the built and landscaped environment is also present in the Library’s photographic collections, including the work of Maynard L. Parker, William M. Clarke, the Harold Parker Studio, the “Dick” Whittington Studio, and the records of Southern California Edison. Since the early 1980s, The Huntington has housed the documents, reports, and Federal Works Progress Administration land use maps from the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Department and the Los Angeles City Department of Planning.

In addition to the Southern California collections, the Library has architectural drawings by Thomas Jefferson, including designs for the grounds and buildings of his plantation Monticello and the College of William and Mary. British history holdings feature the largest collection in the world on Stowe House, located in Buckinghamshire, England, containing thousands of maps, architectural plans, and sketches of the estate and gardens as they developed and evolved between 1564 and 1919.

Significant rare books include Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485), the first work on architecture to be printed in the West, and early editions of Vitruvius, Sebastiano Serlio, and Andrea Palladio. There is also an extensive collection of 18th-century British architectural and landscape design books. Nineteenth-century materials of interest include American architectural and pattern books, as well as John Ruskin’s holograph manuscript for The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849).

Resource Guides:
Southern California Architecture Research Guide

Digital Resources:
Palmer Conner Collection of Color Slides of Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Assessor Road Maps