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These realms and layers of information are presented through simple multimedia interfaces, richly cross-linked and interconnected, at the same time both highly browsable, as traditional magazines have been, and highly searchable, as traditional databases have been. The simplicity and richness of reader experience is backed by extensive custom software frameworks, some entirely home-grown, most built up from industry standard open software.

The great majority of what we publish is provided free online. This is primarily because that's really our fundamental drive, to share knowledge and appreciation of beauty and quality in design and building simply as widely and deeply as possible. Secondarily, we can get away with it because free and open is a good business strategy on the Web in general.

Architecture at Internet Speed

ArchitectureWeek is the leading magazine of design and building online, providing news and features weekly on architecture and construction, digital media, and building culture to some 400,000 monthly visitors. We aim to set a new standard for accessible, frank, accurate, probing, integrated, and inclusive coverage of the built environment.

ArchitectureWeek provides timely information and images with an independent perspective, for architects, builders, designers, planners, and other AEC industry professionals, for home makers, students, and teachers of design, and for everyone who appreciates good buildings and places, great design, quality craftsmanship, and the thoughts that make them real.

We cover new buildings as they open worldwide, and a broad spectrum of design, technical, and cultural issues. ArchitectureWeek showcases articles from well known journalists and experts in every aspect of architectural design, practice, building technology, and digital media.

Publication of ArchitectureWeek is funded largely by subscription contributions from our regular monthly readers, together with display and email newsletter advertising, and sponsorships. Joining the email list for our weekly "ArchitectureWeek Notes" email newsletter is free. Subscription contributions are warmly appreciated, and special benefits are available for contributing subscribers, including full access to more than 10,000 high-resolution images in our complete online archives. Distribution of ArchitectureWeek is electronic-only, via Internet, to the Artifice architecture web family audience of a million monthly visitors.

Reference Set

Before ArchitectureWeek, there was GreatBuildings, presenting a kind of consensus set of world architectural history, from Stonehenge to the Petronas Towers. In fact, GreatBuildings.com is a long-term outgrowth and evolutionary development from The Great Buildings Collection on CD-ROM, a multimedia encyclopedia of architecture which was the best selling architecture CD-ROM at Amazon.com for years. Today, GreatBuildings provides an encyclopedic depth for linked references in articles in ArchitectureWeek, every week.

With more than ten years online, GreatBuildings is our single busiest architecture web site, understandably since it serves a broad general audience as well as the design professional. The GreatBuildings visitor can be anything from a New York style guru cross-checking a precedent detail, to an elementary school student looking for an Eiffel Tower image for a French class report.

Powered mostly by the images resources of GreatBuildings, our Artifice Images section provides quality architectural stock photography to leading publishers, authors, periodicals, and creative agencies worldwide, from our collection of ten of thousands of photos by represented photographers.

Design Communities

DesignCommunity.com provides free forums for public communication on a host of topics related to world architecture, sustainable design, and 3D design in particular. DesignCommunity provides richly cross-connected online forums for direct person-to-person interaction, integrated with the other, more directly content-oriented ArchitectureWeek sites.

DesignCommunity also serves as an architectural mini-portal, with news, key links, and several search functions. Our hope is that by collecting the online discussion areas - at their best, much like shared, collective blogs - in one place for all our sites and many others, we can encourage and support cross-connections between the different people using the various connected realms.

Community-Created

While the traditional established concept of a professional magazine tends to be seen as top-down, with key value descending hierarchically from editors on high through tight control, Archiplanet intentionally takes a wide open, freely participatory approach where valuable information is built up incrementally and evolutionarily by a broad diverse network of contributors.

Archiplanet is a community-constructed collection for all the buildings, building users, and building creators on planet Earth. "Community-constructed" means we are creating this site together, with 115,350 pages as of 15 August, 2007, like an architectural version of the famous Wikipedia. And in fact the Archiplanet uses the same easy open source MediaWiki software as Wikipedia itself.

Archiplanet is the most fundamentally community-driven branch of the ArchitectureWeek family of public-access resources* for design and building. Any registered user can edit or create almost any page at Archiplanet, with helpful support from the Archiplanet staff. Comprehensive change-tracking and community reciprocality back up this radically open collective-creation approach.

Archiplanet is the community-constructed content site for all the buildings and building creators on Earth, sponsored by ArchitectureWeek and GreatBuildings.com.
Post and edit the facts, photos, and descriptive drawings here on your favorite buildings of all kinds, anywhere, from your own cottage to your nation's capitol.

Network Effects

All these sites are published for communication and development of shared understanding, depending on the individual contributions of hundreds and millions of people around the world for their creation. Together we can learn, and love, and help evolve our environments toward the more beautiful, more sustainable, more humane, more natural world we believe is both possible, and necessary.

Archiplanet, in one corner, is being created continuously through an open collaboration of all kinds of people, from around the world - from homeowners to architects, from bricklayers to professional editors to travelers and building managers. ArchitectureWeek, in another, is a traditional serious periodical where every word is vetted before publication. Layering these different modes of participation is a big part of what we're exploring these day. And we want your input, help, and feedback.

At Artifice we believe that good media, like most good tools, are clear, simple, and powerful. Much as a timeless quality is found in great works of architecture, a timeless quality is also found in great tools, including these collective creations. Our hope is to serve you with this quality - to transcend mere technology - to help us unlock the power of shared and individual imaginations.

Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...

Kevin Matthews is Editor in Chief of ArchitectureWeek.

SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Archiplanet.org is a community-created architecture wiki that connects with ArchitectureWeek. Image: Artifice Images The Taj Mahal building page at GreatBuildings.com. Image: Artifice Images High-resolution interactive aerial photos, like this one of the Taj Mahal, are available for most Great Buildings. Image: Artifice Images; map and satellite imagery courtesy of GoogleMaps. The GreatBuildings.com Google Maps mashups show interactive maps of all the Great Buildings in a given city, state, or country. Image: Artifice Images Anyone can add a new building, firm or architect page at Archiplanet.org. Image: Artifice Images Building pages at Archiplanet show detailed facts about the building, together with images, text, maps and links to other sites. Image: Artifice Images Detailed information about a firm can be found at Archiplanet, cross-linked their building pages and also with the ArchitectureWeek Architects Directory. Image: Artifice Images Google Maps can be integrated into any Archiplanet page. Image: Artifice Images; map and satellite imagery courtesy of GoogleMaps.   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.