How often do you find yourself looking for architectural ideas or inspiration? For someone in my position (an architect) it’s pretty often. Pinterest, Instagram, and Google Images are all great BUT when it comes to actually extracting value from these snippets it’s not the easiest thing to do. ArchDaily on the other hand is a great curated selection of architectural projects that you can directly extract value for your own projects. After years of returning to ArchDaily.com, I think it’s time to break it down for the uninitiated.

Step 1: Set the Category:

This part is pretty self-explanatory, I recommend not narrowing it down too much. For example, instead of choosing a sub-category like “Loft” just select the parent “Housing”. If you go through the three steps and still have too many options come back and narrow down your category.

Step 2: Select the Country/Region:

In this section, I think it’s important to either pick the country that you are in OR (in the case of many countries there aren’t many published projects) choose a country that is similar to your climate. For example, I’m looking for houses in Qatar but there aren’t any published, so I will select Kuwait (close enough and similar in climate and societal norms).

Step 3: Set the Area Range:

This may be the most useful search tool on ArchDaily. This one is pretty simple, depending on the built area that you envision just set a range (plus or minus) and this will ensure you get references that actually fit your desired final outcome.

With these three steps, you will be able to narrow down the selection and find projects and architects that have solved problems that you may be facing in your own design. There are other tools built into ArchDaily and its parent company Architonic, but we will get to that another time.