At Stayner Architects, we have two generations of history as an architecture firm practicing in Southern California and building across the Western United States. Because of this, we have an archive of our own that informs our current projects through the expertise we’ve built over decades. Individual projects, for diverse clients with their own histories and institutional memories, often require us to engage with other archives. Each project and partnership comes with its own collection of records: images and texts to which we refer when building new narratives for ourselves and for our current work.

Deep Springs College has a strange and illustrious history; its founder, L.L. Nunn, was an industrialist and early investor in energy, finance, and education infrastructures in the Western United States. When he founded Deep Springs, he intended it as both an institution and an ideal community that would mold the next generation of American engineers as deeply invested in both scientific knowledge and philosophy and ethics.

Christian Stayner, co-founder and principal of Stayner Architects, spent two years at Deep Springs before completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Walter S. White, whose papers are held in UCSB’s Architecture and Design Collection, experimented with wood composite long (nearly 60 years) before its 21st century manifestation in mass-timber projects the world over. The Miles C. Bates House, designed around White’s patented “Hyperbolic Paraboloid Roof Structure,” was an experiment in the marriage of then-in-vogue modernist domestic interiors with ahead-of-its-time building technologies.

The Getty Institute maintains one of California’s most robust architecture archives, with holdings that include the drawings and personal artifacts of California-local as well as international architecture firms. Our own work, from the firm’s first era, is featured in the Julius Schulman archives.