This year, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the National Park Service (NPS) celebrates its seventy-fifth year.  The program was established in 1933 to create a public archive of America's architectural heritage, consisting of measured drawings, historical reports, and large-format black-and-white photographs.  HABS is supported through a tripartite agreement with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Library of Congress.  According to the agreement, NPS manages the program and generates guidelines and standards, the Library of Congress maintains the collection and provides public accessibility, and the AIA offers technical support and advice.  The program was initiated as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" administration, yet the AIA's Committee on Preservation of Historic Buildings, and its chairman, Leicester B. Holland, also deserve a great deal of credit for its inception.

            Members ofthe AIA envisioned the formation of an archive of architectural documentation that was national in scope as far back as 1918.  It was then that the Board of Directors first endorsed the idea of a "national survey" with the intent of "securing records of structures of historic interest." However, it was not until 1930 that the idea finally gained momentum through the efforts of one of its members, Leicester B. Holland.  An architect by training, Holland was chief of the Division of Fine Arts of the Library of Congress.  In 1929, a generous donation of approximately 5,000 photographic negatives of historic buildings from renowned photographer Francis Benjamin Johnston laid the foundation for a new collection. Backed by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the following year Holland launched the Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture (PAEAA), the Library's first photographic collection devoted to the study of architecture.  To help facilitate contributions to the collection, Holland turned to the AIA and its network of state and local chapters.  Speaking before those gathered at the May 1930 meeting of the AIA he announced the start of the collection and requested assistance in its promotion.  As was recorded in the AIA's Journal of Proceedings, "What I wish of the [American] Institute [of Architects] primarily is its good will. . . . Secondarily, I wish the Institute members to spread word of this organization-the archives which we are founding-through the country [and] through the districts to which they belong" so that individuals with photographic negatives of historic buildings "can be induced to send them to the Library of Congress for keeping."  The PAEAA, Holland believed, would serve as a hedge against the loss of the nation's architectural heritage.  As it was explained, "for the purposes of general study of our ancestral architecture, especially for such examples as are doomed to disappear, there is urgent need for a repository where photographic records from the whole United States may be assembled."  The AIA's enthusiastic response to Holland's pictorial archive was likely a factor in his appointment as chairman of their Committee on Preservation of Historic Buildings in 1931. 

            Holland was dedicated not just to the amassing of photographic images, but to a commitment, shared with others at the AIA, to undertaking a more systematic survey of historic buildings across the country.  Setting the agenda for the Committee, Holland understood that before it could begin, there needed to be instilled within the public an awareness that "everywhere [there are] certain old buildings of great historic interest, locally and therefore nationally, which should be preserved wherever possible as landmarks of the course of American civilization."  The survey that Holland proposed was in many ways an outgrowth of the Beaux Arts tradition in which scores of the AIA's members of that period were trained.  An important part of the Beaux Arts methodology was the "surveying" or drawing of historic buildings as a means of understanding architectural forms and their usefulness in creating new designs.  When the AIA announced its intention to begin its "national survey" in May 1933, it was anticipated that this would form the basis of a larger preservation plan.  According to Holland, "The first step in any general campaign for preservation is obviously the investigation of what and where our historic buildings are and why they should be subjects for public consideration." Within months, the federal government acknowledged its own commitment to the documentation of the nation's architectural heritage, eventually to join forces with the AIA and the Library.

            On November 8, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt revealed, as part of his "New Deal" programs, the formation of the Civil Works Administration.  A call went out to all federal agencies to submit ideas for short-term make-work projects.  National Park Service architect Charles E. Peterson responded with the proposal for HABS as a mechanism for employing out-of-work architects. Peterson was aware of the work of Holland and the AIA, but was also influenced by personal experience.  A few years prior, in 1930, Peterson was tasked with overseeing the development of a scenic parkway linking the newly-designated National Historic Sites at Yorktown and Jamestown to Williamsburg, Virginia.  This early NPS foray into the field of historic preservation reflected the vision of Director Horace Albright to broaden the traditional park focus on preserving naturalistic western landscapes to include the cultural heritage of the east.  During the process of developing Colonial Parkway, Peterson also became acquainted with William G. Perry and the other architects with the firm Perry, Shaw & Hepburn, who were involved in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg.  In order to learn first-hand about colonial-period styles and construction techniques, the Williamsburg architects conducted field investigations throughout the Tidewater region, studying and recording pre-revolutionary buildings.  As Peterson later reminisced:

They [architects Perry, Shaw and Hepburn] began the graphic analysis of the distinctive Tidewater eighteenth-century style with the brilliant success still to be seen in their earliest work.  It ranges all the way from wooden smokehouses in backyards to the great, reconstructed Governor's Palace.  Careful study of the numerous antique structures still standing across the Tidewater country gave the architects a mastery of the local style.  The relationship between the structures and measurements projected on paper became a highly developed subject.  The drafting rooms were full of adventure and excitement and every junior architect was working on a book of his own.  Though not a Rockefeller employee, I was working nearby (Jamestown to Yorktown) and knew them all.

Activities such as these clearly informed Peterson's concept for HABS.  In fact, he turned immediately to Perry and Holland for support of his proposal.  From Perry, he obtained an endorsement signed by each member of the Williamsburg Advisory Committee of Architects, stating, "The [HABS] plan as detailed impresses us as an admirable method of accomplishing a work of historic importance." Once the HABS proposal was accepted in December 1933, Leicester Holland and the Committee on Preservation of Historic Buildings were poised to take action.  Not surprisingly, many of the first "district officers" who managed the individual HABS surveys in the field were members of the AIA committee or of local AIA chapters.  As Holland stated in 1936, "If the [American] Institute [of Architects] had not been ready organized to nominate District Officers at the drop of the hat, the first campaign would hardly have gotten under way before quitting time."  Within weeks of receiving its approval, hundreds of the unemployed were in the field recording for HABS.  Leicester Holland was appointed by the Secretary of the Interior as the chairman of the HABS Advisory Board, and served along with William Perry of Colonial Williamsburg, and other noted architects Albert Simons of Charleston South Carolina, John Gaw Meem of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Thomas E. Tallmadge of Chicago, Illinois.  And in his capacity as the Chief of the Fine Arts Division of the Library of Congress, Holland became the first curator of the HABS collection. 

            Looking back at Peterson's original HABS proposal, many of the same concepts used to justify earlier efforts by Holland and others are eloquently conveyed:

Our architectural heritage of buildings from the last four centuries diminishes at an alarming rate.  The ravages of fire and the natural elements, together with the demolition and alterations caused by real estate 'improvements' form an inexorable tide of destruction destined to wipe out the great majority of the buildings which knew the beginning and first flourish of the nation. . . .   The comparatively few structures which can be saved by extraordinary effort and presented as exhibition houses and museums or altered and used for residences or minor commercial uses comprise only a minor percentage of the interesting and important architectural specimens which remains from the old days.  It is the responsibility of the American people that if the great number of our antique buildings must disappear through economic causes; they should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.

Peterson's submission for HABS was thus the culmination of years of preliminary work on the part of architects within both the government and the private sector.  For those at the top levels of government, it was the immediate need for employment opportunities that provided the impetus for the formation of HABS.  However, it was the desire to mitigate the effects upon the nation's history and culture of rapidly vanishing architectural resources, recognized by its promoters, that would sustain it.  HABS was a significant boon to historic preservation at the national level, predating by more than a year the Historic Sites Act of 1935-the first piece of federal preservation legislation. The act was a major step towards a national policy of safeguarding historic places for public benefit; the act called for the preservation of America's nationally significant historic sites, buildings, objects and antiquities.  Proponents of the act cited the pioneering work of HABS.  Thus it is no coincidence that the act specifically mentioned the collection and preservation of drawings, photographs, and other data, while also calling for surveys of historic buildings and sites. 

            The importance of the HABS program today resides in the scope of the collection and its public accessibility, as well as in the establishment of national standards for recording historic architecture, currently recognized as the Secretary of the Interior's Standards and Guidelines for Architectural and Engineering Documentation.  As was intended, the HABS collection represents "a complete resume of the builder's art," ranging "from the smallest utilitarian structures to the largest and most monumental." The materials are available to the public copyright-free and online through the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and the American Memory web site.  As a resource for architectural historians, restoration architects, preservationists, scholars, and those of all ages interested in American history and architecture, HABS is one of the most widely used of the Library's collections.  It is, in fact, among the largest collections of architectural documentation in the world, containing records on nearly 40,000 historic sites and structures nationwide, encompassing over 60,000 measured drawings, 250,000 large-format photographs, and untold pages of history.  The AIA-HABS Coordinating Committee, a subcommittee of the AIA Historic Resource Committee, still meets annually to provide advice and assistance to the HABS program.

           

A number of events are planned in celebration of the HABS 75^th anniversary.  An exhibition is being held at the U.S. Interior Department Museum entitled, American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at 75 Years, on display July 18 through November 15, 2008. On November 14, 2008, the Library of Congress is sponsoring a HABS Symposium (more information to follow).  That evening, the Charles E. Peterson Prize awards will be presented for the best sets of measured drawings to HABS standards by a student or student group at the U.S. Interior Department Museum. 

[For more information about the AIA-HABS Coordinating Committee and the AIA Historic Resources Committee, contact Kathleen Simpson at kathleensimpson@aia.org. For information about the HABS program, contact Catherine C. Lavoie at catherine_lavoie@nps.gov.]