Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, 1933 - Present

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• Learn more about American history, architecture, culture, and photography.

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The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded America’s built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 350,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. This online presentation of the HABS/HAER collections includes digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written history pages, and supplemental materials. Since the National Park Service’s HABS and HAER programs create new documentation each year, digital images will continue to be added to the online collections.

This site also provides links to the HABS/HAER Web site at the National Park Service, which administers the HABS and HAER programs that create the surveys through fieldwork and primary research. Another feature of this Web site, the Highlights Map and Image Gallery, includes one image of a site or structure in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. These images represent the geographic, chronological, cultural, and subject diversity of the documentation in the HABS/HAER collections.