Holiday cards show the wit, humor, and personal side of creators of built environments The Environmental Design Archives (EDA) at University California, Berkeley is the repository for some lofty architectural and design collections, but perhaps its most charming holding is a small, little known, and never-sought-out assemblage of personal Christmas cards.
There are about 200 cards, and they include a hand-drawn holiday missive from Bernard Maybeck to Julia Morgan, cards featuring sketches of great buildings and city skylines by George Rockrise, and a seasonal photographic greeting by Ernest Kump.

Environmental Design Archives
This holiday postcard was crafted by architect Bernard Maybeck and reads: ?Christmas Greetings for the Maybecks.?
The cards are something of a pet project for curator Waverly Lowell. She is at the helm of the EDA, and when she shows the cards to a reporter, she lays them out on a table that came from the offices of Henry Meyers, a prolific Bay Area architect with 200 government buildings to his name. (The room also contains furniture from the offices of Willis Polk, Bernard Maybeck, and Edith Heath). For someone who loves architecture, the confluence of histories is intoxicating.
?We are not actively collecting them,? Lowell says, looking over the cards. ?But when they come to us, either in personal papers or through the mail, we save them if they are originally created pieces.? Meaning, most of cards here are designed...