Since it was founded in 2008, ArchDaily has gotten pretty big. At over 18,000 projects and over 33,000 total articles (to date), the number of pages, images and words that collectively form the ArchDaily website is mind-boggling. In our newsroom you'll often hear references to "the iceberg" - in other words, what you see on the homepage is just a fraction of ArchDaily, while the rest lurks beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered. As editors, one of our biggest challenges is to help you discover it.
We already have a few methods in place to enable this: on our Facebook page we often post older articles or projects that have proven to be popular in the past, and one of the biggest benefits of our recent platform upgrade has been a new, multifaceted search for projects that allows you, for example, to look for "Brick Houses in the United States by Frank Lloyd Wright" and narrow 18,000 projects down to just three.
This week, we're launching a series of articles that we hope will do something similar for some of our most informative and thought-provoking news and editorial articles: ArchDaily Essentials.
The premise of AD Essentials is simple: take some of the most important and complex topics affecting architecture today and explain them as completely as we can. That's a tough task but fortunately, for many such topics, ArchDaily has spent years publishing news stories, feature articles and opinion pieces on all the relevant issues - all we need is an article to connect the dots and tell you where to go to read more.
Here's how it will work:
- AD Essentials is part article series and part database directory; it gives you a convenient way to access our existing articles, but it also builds a coherent framework around them with a "crash course"-style explanation that gives you a better sense of how each piece contributes to the puzzle.
- AD Essentials articles will be useful to all sorts of people. Are you a first year student who has an afternoon to learn about a topic from scratch? Great! Read the article, click all the links, and read all of those articles too. Strapped for time? No problem! Just read the article itself - the other articles will be there for you whenever you're ready to delve deeper. Already an expert on the issue at hand? Well done! Use the AD Essentials article as a directory to seek out alternative opinions and analysis on a specific aspect of the topic.
- As Socrates once said, true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing. But how can you know which important architectural topics you don't know about? All of our AD Essentials articles will be collected in a single landing page, giving you a convenient place to browse the limits of your knowledge.
- AD Essentials is a living thing: in addition to working hard to add new AD Essentials topics, we will also keep the articles themselves up to date, adding links to relevant news stories and other articles whenever we publish them.
To kick off ArchDaily Essentials in style, every day for the rest of this week we'll be publishing articles on some of the most important topics in architecture that you should know about - so look out for AD Essentials articles on Sustainability, Modernism, Postmodernism, China, 3D Printing and Smart Cities over the next six days.
Want to contribute to our AD Essentials section? Have an idea about what topic we should tackle next? Let us know!
