About
Architecture is made through relationships.
A studio, a drawing, a decision about a material, a product chosen over another. The building is the record of all of it. Put that building online and the relationships are the first thing to go.
Why this exists
The web has been generous to architecture. There are more photographs, more drawings and more writing about buildings than at any point in the discipline's history. What it has not produced is a way through.
A project lives on one site. The studio that designed it keeps a portfolio on another. The furniture inside it is catalogued by a manufacturer who has never seen that room. Each page is complete on its own terms and ends where the next one should begin.
So the ordinary questions turn out to be hard. What is that chair. Who else has specified it. What else has this studio built. Which brands does it return to. Anyone who has tried knows the answer usually arrives by accident, or not at all.
Archtivy exists to make those relationships visible — not to collect more architecture, but to connect what is already there.
What we connect
Projects
Buildings and interiors, with the studio that designed them and the products specified inside — where those have been credited.
Architects and design studios
A body of work rather than a single entry, reachable from any project it produced.
Products
Furniture, lighting, surfaces and building products, shown alongside the spaces they have been used in.
Design brands
The makers behind those products, and the projects their work has ended up in.
Materials, locations and recurring specifications hold these together. A material links a project to the products that carry it; a city links a studio to the work around it.
How we work
Studios and brands present their own work. We do not rank architecture or decide which projects deserve attention — the connections between them are what we build.
Some of those connections are stated by the people who made the work. Others are suggested visually, by resemblance, and we say which is which. A product credited as used in a project is not the same claim as a product that merely looks similar, and the two are never presented as though they were.
Where a relationship has not been established, we show nothing rather than fill the gap. An empty section is honest. An invented credit is not.
This is deliberately early work. The network is dense in some categories and sparse in others, and it becomes more useful as studios and brands add their work and credit what is in it.
What we are building toward
That anyone looking at a building can find their way to everything that made it — the studio, the products, the brands, the materials — and keep going from there.
That a studio's work is discoverable through the products inside it, and a brand's products through the spaces they appear in. That the relationships architecture is already built on survive the journey online.
Start anywhere.
Open a project and follow it outward, or begin with a product and see where it lives.