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Architecture Research

A guide to navigating the Architecture collections at the Chicago History Museum.

Requesting material

Once you find a record in the Main Architecture Inventory that you are interested in, you'll notice there is a button that allows you request to view the material. This will take you to a form that will auto-populate with the information from the record you are viewing. Please note, research center staff will assess your request and get back to you within one week. Due to staffing reductions, not every request can be accommodated at this time. 

When onsite in the research center, white call slips for architectural material are available at the reference desk. In general, research center staff will need architect name, accession number, and job name and number to page material. Information about the location of materials is not available in the architecture inventory. Email research@chicagohistory.org to inquire about availability. 

Onsite Material: Advance request is still suggested for architectural material even if it is known to be onsite. Generally 48 hours is sufficient for processed collections.

Offsite Material: Due to staffing reductions, material that is stored offsite or is unprocessed is inaccessible at this time.

As a general rule, all rolled drawings in tubes as well as oversize folders of drawings with an accession number from 1989.379.1 – present are onsite. Most architectural manuscript material in boxes is also onsite. All other architectural material is stored offsite.

Inventory of Architectural Drawings

Additional search tips: 

  • Address information has been populated when available. Please note that not all addresses have been standardized to CHM's preferred format of fully spelling out address data. Example: 1601 North Clark Street. Start with the full spelling but be sure to try additional abbreviations if you aren't finding what you're looking for.
  • The main access point for this collection is by architect or firm. If you have this information, it can be helpful to filter by architect or firm name if you want to narrow your search.
  • Please note, this inventory only contains job level information about architectural drawings (oversize folders or tubes). In some cases, manuscript and photographic material may be available as well. There are paper based draft finding aids for most of this material available in the research center, but it will not appear in this inventory. Some information about additional material may also be available in ARCHIE.
  • See more tips on how to search Airtable on our Searching CHM Collections research guide.
  • As always, if you get stuck, reference staff is available to help with your search. Please reach out to us at research@chicagohistory.org.

 

ARCHIE

A small selection of material is discoverable in ARCHIE and we are continuing to add records and enhance metadata, so be sure to check back frequently. To limit to just architectural holdings use the first drop down box left of the search box, and select "Architecture." Most records are minimally described collection level records. See the section of this guide, Searching ARCHIE for more search tips. 

Onsite in the ARC

Finding aids for manuscript and photographic material are available in the research center's grey binders. These are paper based inventories of box or folder level holdings organized by architect. The grey binders also contain the original cataloging sheets for job level drawings, which were transcribed into the Airtable inventory. 

Other collections

The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago also maintains significant holdings for Chicago architectural materials. You can access their online catalog here.

Additionally the Chicago Architecture Center has several online resources related to buildings in Chicago.