Architectural Archive Stays Close to Home

Talk about good neighbors.

Architect and urban planner Barton Myers, who lives in Montecito, entrusted his professional archive to the nearby University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara.

“It is great that I found a home for it,” Myers said from his office in Beverly Hills. “This way you can see 30 years of an architect’s work. There are a lot of beautiful drawings.” A lot means about 700,000.

Myers, 66, is best known as designer of the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark and for his award-winning steel houses. He said he considered giving his work to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, but UC Santa Barbara won out for a couple of reasons.

“I like to have [the collection] next door,” he said, because “one, I can watch. Two, I can go in and look at things--you might be doing a book or research.”

Also, he wanted a place that accepts collections in their entirety. “I decided not to sell anything, that it should be all together so you can see the life of an architect, the evolution of drawings,” Myers explained. At UCSB his archive joins the ranks of Irving J. Gill, Rudolph Schindler, Albert Frey and Cliff May.

The University Art Museum is presenting an exhibition on the architect’s work titled “Barton Myers: 3 Steel Houses” through June 17.

“You can see the evolution from ink to computer drawings,” he added. “Of the three steel houses shown, the first two, in Canada, are ink or pencil drawings, but the recent ones [of the architect’s own house in Montecito] combine freehand and computer.”

Myers and his wife, Vicki, moved into the steel-and-glass home in winter of 1998. Situated on 40 wooded acres in the hills of southern Santa Barbara County, the residence is three separate pavilions built on a slope, with Myers’ studio at the top, the main residence in the middle and a guest house and garage at the bottom.

Myers will give a free public lecture titled “Steel” on Friday at 6 p.m. at UCSB’s Humanities and Social Science Building, Room 1174. Information: (805) 893-2951.

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Candace A. Wedlan is at candace.wedlan@latimes.com.