Architectus a free architectural resources

Iconic buildings of the past and present are being brought to life thanks to architectural drawings going online through Architectus.

The Architectus archive contains unique student designs from the 1930s to the 1950s and work from famous post-war architects like John Madin - who designed Telford as a new town, Pebble Mill and Birmingham Central Library amongst other projects in the 1960s and 1970s. Buildings featured in the resource range from Selfridges in Birmingham to an edible gingerbread house and the iconic THE CUBE.

Developed by Birmingham City University and made possible by Jisc, the resource contains over 5,000 assets. It is useful to students studying architecture, allowing investigation into new and old techniques, period styles and the building of scale models. 

Bev Cole, project manager for the Architectus Project, Birmingham City University, says: “One of the key directives of the Architectus initiative was to provide students with the detailed, high quality drawings needed to further their education. This is probably the best open educational resource of original, primary sourced, contemporary design and building plans for the wider educational community available on the web. The projects couldn’t have been possible without Jisc’s support.”

Content has been both digitised and centralised to develop this wealth of information and includes video interviews with building designers complemented by suggestive learning activities, plans, drawings, elevations, sketches and photographs. The resource also contains maps which you can click on to see the buildings from a street view. Alongside this, users can rate the resources, add comments and submit new building designs to help grow the archive.

Luke Nagle, student engagement mentor at Birmingham City University, explains previous difficulties when searching for information: “My personal experience is that sourcing detailed and high quality architectural drawings has always been troublesome. More often than not this is due to financial constraints, a general lack of information available on the web and commercial intellectual property rights.”

Following a model making workshop with first year architect students to test the usefulness of the resource, academic tutor Jim Sloane of Birmingham City University said: “The results of the model-making workshop reflected the effectiveness of the Architectus project sourced drawings. The models were far more accurate in both scale and detail. Interestingly, the students that used the Architectus drawings required less input from the tutor due to the quality of the Architectus content.”

The content was sourced from dozens of commercial architectural practices and the RIBA West Midlands (Birmingham and Five Counties Architectural Association Trust) archive. You can search for resources by practice or archive name, architect, building project, sector, category, materials used or date. 

Paola Marchionni, digitisation programme manager at Jisc, says: "This project represents another excellent partnership that Jisc is proud to have supported. It's great to see the Birmingham team work with a variety of commercial architectural practices to bring their drawings and models to life. Buildings old and new have now been turned into high quality digital resources to fill a gap in architectural studies and support students in improving their skills and experience. Luckily, these resources are freely accessible and can also be enjoyed by the general public." 

You can find more information on the Architectus blog.

About 

Following a highly competitive bidding process, Birmingham City University was thrilled with news in late 2011 to win substantial funding from Jisc http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ (part of the UK Higher Education sector) to undertake an innovative project called Architectus(Architecturally Useful Scholarly Resources) under the E-Content 2011-13 Jisc Programme.

Architectus provides what we believe are exciting internationally recognised Open Educational Resources (known as OERs) for teaching and learning purposes in Architecture and the Built Environment – including digital primary sourced drawings, concept designs, construction plan amongst other valuable digitised resources now available to the wider teaching and learning community under an open Creative Commons licensing model.

Please feel free to browse, view and download both Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association Trust Archives and contemporary architectural Practices collections.

For more information please check out the project blog http://jiscarchitectus.wordpress.com/ or contact the Architectus project manager in CELT, beverley.cole@bcu.ac.uk (tel. 0121 331 6350) or Kevin Singh, kevin.singh@bcu.ac.uk , Head of Birmingham School of Architecture, BIAD.