The Architecture and Design Collection at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara is one of the largest architectural archives in North America. More than 230 collections and archives make up the ADC, a portrait of design in the region through the work of well-known figures such as Irving Gill, John Byers, Roland Coate, Sr., George Washington Smith, Myron Hunt and Harold Chambers, Robert Stacy-Judd, R. M. Schindler, Lutah Maria Riggs, Thornton Abell, Gregory Ain, Julius R. Davidson, Palmer Sabin, Kem Weber, Whitney Smith and Wayne Williams, Edward Killingsworth, Rex Lotery, Maynard Lyndon, A. E. Morris, and Barton Myers, among others.
The exhibits, collections, and items featured on this website are a small sampling of the materials archived at the ADC. Please visit the Online Archive of California for a full list of our collections' finding aids.
Featured Item
John Elgin Woolf: Guasti house (Montecito, Calif.)
The Guasti residence, perched high in the hills of Montecito, was designed and built by Woolf. With sweeping views of the Santa Ynez mountains to the…
Featured Collection
Cliff May (1908-1989): Custom Ranch Houses
Cliff May, known as 'the father of the ranch house,' was an early proponent of the California style ranch house. He first built hacienda style houses…
Featured Exhibit
Irving J. Gill: Simplicity and Reform
Irving J. Gill (1870-1936) is known for his refined and abstracted architectural vocabulary, which he described as “the straight line,...
Recently Added Items
Irving J. Gill: Horatio West court (Santa Monica, Calif.)
Gill helped Schindler and Claude Chase form and raise the tilt-slab walls for the Schindler house on Kings Road, 1921. Invoices in the Schindler…
Irving J. Gill: Gill cottages (San Diego, Calif.)
Gill designed approximately eight cottages for parcels of land he purchased in San Diego. There is little documentation for these, but all or most of…
Irving J. Gill: Daily Blade-Tribune building (Oceanside, Calif.)
In the last year of his life, with the Depression still strong, Gill designed at least four buildings, of which only the Blade-Tribune newspaper…
Irving J. Gill: South Bay Union School (San Diego, Calif.)
Gill designed a number of schools. A 1913 article about his concrete public school for the City of Fontana praised the large outdoor playground and…
Irving J. Gill: Rancho Barona Resettlement project (near Lakeside, Calif.)
The architect and planner Frederick Gutheim worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1930s. His letters to architectural critic Esther McCoy and…
Irving J. Gill: Laughlin Park Casa Grandes development (Los Angeles, Calif.)
The Los Angeles Herald published several articles announcing the luxury housing development at Laughlin Park. A 1912 article announced that Gill was…
Irving J. Gill: Lewis- Bella Vista Terrace court (Sierra Madre, Calif.)
Gill’s site planning was especially successful in this project. He pushed the cottages to the outside edge of the plot to leave a large public area…