This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the establishment of America’s first federal historic preservation program, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the National Park Service. The program began in late 1933 as one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” initiatives to provide employment to architects unable to find work during the Depression. Members of the AIA, in particular Leicester Holland and his Committee on the Preservation of Historic Buildings, were among those most influential in the formation of the HABS program. And many of the committee’s members served on either the HABS Advisory Board, or as the first “District Officers,” administering locally based HABS surveys all across the nation.

HABS was made permanent in the spring of 1934 under a tripartite agreement between the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the American Institute of Architects. The role of the AIA is to provide technical support for the measured drawings component of the program. Today the HABS collection (along with the collections of the Historic American Engineering Record, creating in 1969; and the Historic American Landscapes Survey, created in 2000) contains 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. It is one of the most heavily used special collections in the Library of Congress, and one of the largest architectural collections in the World.

Events planned in celebration of the 75th anniversary include an exhibition entitled American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at 75 Years, at the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum, 1849 C Street, NW, first floor, that opens on Wednesday, July 23; and a HABS Symposium sponsored by the Library of Congress, to be held in the Mumford Room of the Madison Building, Library of Congress, on November 14, 2008, from 9:00AM to 4:30PM. Following the symposium will be the award ceremony for the AIA supported Charles E. Peterson Prize, a student competition for the best set of measured drawings undertaken to HABS standards. The ceremony will be held at the Interior Department Museum, in view of the HABS exhibition.