The modernist home of designers Charles and Ray Eames is now featured in the online Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) collection at the Library of Congress. The Eames House and Studio in Pacific Palisades, California, was designed by the couple in 1949 and for over twenty years served as a base for their prolific careers developing furniture, buildings, exhibitions, toys, and films that have come to define “mid-century modern.”
In 2013, a team sponsored by the Historic Preservation Education Foundation, the University of Southern California Heritage Conservation program, and the Getty Conservation Institute documented the home and studio with the support of the Eames Foundation. The historical architects, landscape architects, historians, and USC heritage conservation student interns developed a detailed historical narrative and thirteen high-resolution measured drawings including floor plans, elevations, and details of stairs and window modules. As with other HABS materials digitized and held by the Library of Congress, the drawings and narrative are freely available online for download and public use.
The project was part of an ongoing collaboration between the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic Preservation Education Foundation to expand the representation of post-World War II sites in the HABS/Library of Congress collection. For more information, visit the Historic American Building Survey/Library Congress collection.
