HABS is an acronym for Historic American Buildings Survey, the US Government’s oldest historic preservation program. HABS operates in conjunction with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress and the American Institute of Architects.

Since 1994, Professor Mark Keane has led groups of SARUP students in the incremental work of creating a complete HABS set for Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio in Spring Green Wisconsin. 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 landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes. Upon completion, SARUP TALIESIN HABS team drawings will be submitted as a set to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

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 581,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 43,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century.