Architecture & Design Collection

The University Art Museum is part of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1963, professor David Gebhard (1927-1996) started the Architecture & Design Collection. The museum changed its name to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum in 2012. Today it is one of the largest architectural archives in North America with almost 2,000,000 drawings, as well as papers, photographs, models, decorative objects, and furniture. The focus of the collection is the design and architecture of southern California from the late 19th through the early 21st century.

More than 275 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, Barton Myers, and Harry Wolf, among others.