The Island Architects Collection was donated to the La Jolla Historical Society from 2016 through 2020 by Tony Crisafi, Founding Principal Architect of Island Architects in La Jolla, California. As of 2022, Island Architects has built twenty-five plus years of experience into an extensive portfolio of finely designed and crafted homes. Their passion for design, rooted in modern and classical aesthetics, delivers enduring value that is singular to the client’s goals and dreams and contextual to its Southern California environment. Tony Crisafi and Lisa Kriedeman are the highly accomplished principal architects heading their hand-picked team in creating residences of quiet luxury throughout Southern California, nationally and internationally for more than two decades. From Villas in the Virgin Islands to estates in the rolling hills of Ohio’s horse country, to a grand old lodge in the Tetons and a pastoral country estate on the shores of Lake Geneva and back to La Jolla, Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe, this firm consistently produces some of the nation’s finest homes. This Collection includes drawings from over 50 residences and building projects in La Jolla and other cities; some of which encompass historically preserved properties. See separate listing of the architectural drawings in this Collection under “Additional Collection Guides.”

The La Jolla Historical Society inspires and empowers the community to make La Jolla’s diverse past a relevant part of contemporary life. The La Jolla Historical Society’s Collections encompass over 80 years of actively collecting archival material, books, maps, scrapbooks, ephemera, fine art, newspapers, street and land use files, business and personal documents and historic and archaeological artifacts. The Society boasts over 20,000 photographs, over 1000 postcards, 400-plus architectural drawings and approximately 200 oral history recordings. Collecting was initiated by Howard Randolph and volunteers on the historical committee of the Library Association of La Jolla. The Collection began by gathering photographs and documentation in the late 1930s, which later became the nucleus of the La Jolla Historical Society’s Collections. The Society was created in 1963. Through many moves in location the Society continued collecting and expanding. Accumulated Collections took on its current construct in 2010 after the renovation of the La Jolla Historical Society’s campus of structures in central La Jolla, which consists of the 1904 Wisteria Cottage and 1940s Balmer Annex used for exhibits and programming, and a 1909 cottage used for business and research offices. The late Ellen Browning Scripps’ 1916 automobile garage was also renovated and now houses the Collection in a modern collections storage facility. Materials are housed in archival boxes, sleeves, envelopes and other archival-safe materials and are cared for according to standards and best practices of the museum profession. In 2016, the Society initiated new PastPerfect Museum Software to manage and catalog its Collections and in 2018 started using the Online Archive of California to upload searchable information from its Collections to enable improved public access. The Society will continue these processes and look forward to utilizing new opportunities to collect, preserve and share the history of La Jolla.

82 rolls of architectural plans, 996 individual plans, drawings, renderings, sketches and associated images, 9 photograph albums, 3 loose-leaf binders

The La Jolla Historical Society holds the copyright to any unpublished materials

The Collection is open for research