Papers of architect Dick Finnegan, who was active in the Santa Clara Valley (Calif.) from the 1960s through the 1990s, as well as the Lake Tahoe region. Includes his business records, original architectural drawings, promotional material for housing developments, and photographs, as well as a significant number of Finnegan family home movies and landscape designs by daughter Terry Haugen.

Finnegan was born in San Jose, California, on 1st February 1927, and died on October 21, 2011. He attended San Jose High School, where he played on the football team. After serving a tour in Guam after World War II without seeing combat, Finnegan returned to San Jose and married Barbara Faye Lampman on March 11, 1949. He studied commercial art at San Jose State and the Los Angeles Art Center. The Finnegan family lived in Palo Alto, San Jose, and Saratoga, with a vacation home on Meeks Bay at Lake Tahoe built by Finnegan. Finnegan and partner Jim Fenton started a commercial art firm in San Jose, but after the partnership ended, Finnegan worked as a designer for firms such as Mackay Homes, and worked on his concept for cluster homes as a way to maximize land use, "providing a family dwelling-land development arrangement including a dwelling module in which the density of family dwellings per unit of land is substantially increased while retaining the individual dwellings in separate spaced apart relationship." After starting his own construction firm in the 1970s, the housing industry was hit by recession, and Finnegan changed his business to provide architectural renderings and design. Daughter Terry Haugen, who studied ornamental horticulture at Foothill College, worked alongside Finnegan providing landscape design for his projects. In 1990 Finnegan and his wife moved to Meeks Bay permanently. He continued to work up until his death in 2011.

10 linear feet

Contact the Curator of Research Library & Archives for information on publication and reproduction

The papers are available to researchers by appointment with the Curator of the Research Library & Archives