Looking for some quick references or ways to spice up your drawings? Fire up Google Translate or brush the dust off your Italian to take advantage of this comprehensive vector/dwg/architecture drawing resource site! archweb provides a number of free CAD blocks, downloadable CAD plans and DWG files, for you to study or use in precedent research. From furniture to north arrows, road detailing to room layouts, the website boasts a vast collection of plans, sections and elevations for you to pick and choose from, across a variety of categories. And what’s more, many drawings come complete with closed polylines and shapes for you to fill and hatch to your heart’s content.

Check out these 20 blocks to add quick and easy details to your drawings:

27 years after the Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 1990), Beirut finds itself a city of conflicting personalities. A summer night stroll through the recently completed Zaitunay Bay Marina flaunts the capital’s ongoing facelift. What GQ calls “the chosen destination for young rich cool kids across the globe” is now peppered with glitzy glass-clad high rises, world-class nightclubs, droves of foreign tourists, and high-profile architecture. A Steven Holl-designed yacht club is just minutes away from Herzog & de Meuron’s Beirut Terraces, a luxury condominium skyscraper overlooking a seaside promenade that the resort refers to as an “urban beach.” However, this inner-city development has also had extreme consequences on the city's periphery, as shown clearly in this photoset by Manuel Alvarez Diestro.

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Famous architects are often seen as more enigma than person, but behind even the biggest names hide the scandals and tragedies of everyday life. As celebrities of a sort, many of the world's most famed architects have faced rumors and to this day there are questions about the truth of their private affairs. Clients and others in their studios would get a glimpse into an architect’s personal life, but sometimes the sheer force of personality that often comes with creative genius would prevent much insight. The fact remains, however, that these architects’ lives were more than the sum of their buildings.

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library of Buffalo, New York, has recently opened a new exhibit at their Central Library titled Building Buffalo: Buildings From Books, Books From Buildings. The exhibit will feature a large selection of rare, illustrated architectural books from the Library’s collection dating from the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The bonus for those who are geographically distant from Buffalo is that, as part of the exhibit, the Library has also made dozens of historical architecture books available online, completely digitized and free to the public.

Completed in 2015 at the northern periphery of Madrid, the BBVA Headquarters by Herzog & de Meuron employs a complex network of passages, courtyards, and gardens to create a new corporate campus for the Spanish banking giant. Responding to local climatic needs, the building is recognized for its custom undulating brise-soleil along its facade and pebble-like central tower.

In this photoset, photographer Rubén P. Bescós turns his lens toward the new institutional landmark, capturing the building within its urban context.

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Renderings have been revealed for the upcoming apple store in Milan’s Piazza Liberty, designed by Foster + Partners in their latest collaboration with the technology giant. Following an extremely site-specific approach, the new flagship store will be located under the existing piazza, introducing a new public amphitheater and waterfall feature that will double as the store’s entrance.

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Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are both architects who were known for their grand and innovative ideas—as well as for their high esteem for their own opinions. The two did not, however, see eye to eye in their visions for the future of American cities and civilization. Both architects had utopian, all-encompassing plans for their ideal American city, combining social as well as architectural ideas. In 1932, both described these ideas in The New York Times; in these two articles Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier made their differing beliefs perfectly clear to the public.

This article was originally published on Autodesk's Redshift publication as "Starbucks Japan Pursues a Local Flair Through Design in BIM and VR."

It’s been 20 years since Starbucks opened its first shop in Japan, bringing a new paradigm to the country’s coffee shop culture—and creating a new, appealing “third place” option between home and work or school.

Notably, almost all of Japan’s 1,245 shops—across all 47 prefectures—are directly run by the parent company. As such, they are planned by Starbucks designers who, instead of settling for standardized designs for all locations, have worked diligently to incorporate features expressing regional, historical contexts and the lifestyles of locals—in short, to appeal specifically to the Japanese market.

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Tale of Two Cities: Unravelling the Brutal Backstory Behind Africa’s Emerging Megacities."

In the last two decades, the African narrative has changed phenomenally. The tired, age-old storyline—largely woven around the stereotypes of poverty, disease, and bloody civil wars—has been replaced with one celebrating the continent’s unprecedented economic growth and relative political stability. This new narrative is also about Africa’s gleaming skyscrapers, massive shopping malls, and ambitious “smart” cities being designed and built from scratch: Ebene Cyber City in Mauritius; Konza Technology City in Kenya; Safari City in Tanzania; Le Cite du Fleuve in DR Congo; Eko Atlantic in Nigeria; Appolonia City in Ghana, and others.

There are currently at least twenty of these new cities under construction in Africa and about twice that number in the works. These developments have permanently altered the continent’s urban outlook, and have offered it something different from the bland pastiche of colonial architecture that it was once known for. As a designer, I was initially excited by the quality of some of the architecture. Though I must admit that these new cities are eerie mimicries of similar developments in China, Singapore and even the UAE, and that they’re largely bereft of any cultural connection to Africa.

Over the following weeks we will be sharing a selection of unrealized student projects, alongside realized schemes by practices who explore representational techniques, in collaboration with KooZA/rch. The aim is "to explore the role of the architectural drawing as a tool for communication" and, in the process, provoke a conversation about the contemporary use, format, and role of drawing.

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On Saturday, Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta of RCR Arquitectes accepted the 2017 Pritzker Prize at a ceremony in the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo. ArchDaily is pleased to share, with the permission of The Hyatt Foundation and The Pritzker Architecture Prize, a transcript of the winners' acceptance speech, delivered by Carme Pigem on behalf of the trio.

Your majesties, the Emperor and Empress of Japan; Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso; your excellencies ambassadors and ministers; Tom and Margot Pritzker and members of the Pritzker family; ladies and gentlemen.

Emotions, happiness, pride, humility, respect, responsibility, admiration for those who have gone before us and for those who will receive this award in the future: there is an infinite mixture of many overlapping feelings that we are experiencing now, but the strongest sensation is one of gratitude: To the Pritzker Family, who for years have been generously supporting and bringing attention to architecture, and we ask that they continue to do this.

Construction is an exercise in frugality and compromise. To see their work realized, architects have to juggle the demands of developers, contractors, clients, engineers—sometimes even governments. The resulting concessions often leave designers with a bruised ego and a dissatisfying architectural result. While these architects always do their best to rectify any problems, some disputes get so heated that the architect feels they have no choice but to walk away from their own work. Here are 6 of the most notable examples:

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Scrolling through memes of cats in disguise. Checking if food has magically appeared in your refrigerator every ten minutes. Obsessively arranging books on your shelf by color. Renaming your computer's folders. In short, we seem to thrive on any irrelevant activity to avoid starting a reading, essay, model, or project. Procrastinate now, work later. Your future self can take care of business, after all.

As we suffer through long and strenuous projects, it is likely that we have all slipped into procrastination in order to avoid our next task. Not only do we avoid confronting work at the office or university studio, but also those personal errands which, if we dedicated ourselves, would enhance our daily lives. Below, based on our own experiences and expert opinion, and in order to avoid a host of other jobs around the ArchDaily office, we present 10 tips for architecture procrastinators, helping you to focus on the site analysis diagrams you should probably be doing right now!

Architectural photographer Marc Goodwin, alongside Mathieu Fiol, has recently completed the fifth collection of his "ultra-marathon of photoshoots" – this time in la Ville Lumière, Paris. Following Goodwin's insight into the spaces occupied by Nordic architectural offices, his look at studios both large and small lived in by London-based practices, his lens on a collection of Beijing-based studios and, most recently, his and Felix Nybergh's study of studios in Seoul, the project has now focused on the French capital.

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An environmentally-concious material response by Lukkaroinen Architects, the structural design for the Pudasjärvi Wood Campus in northern Finland highlights the potential of large-scale structural timber.

The project features a primary structure of assembled logs and three types of non-traditional pillars, specially constructed in laminated wood for different areas. 

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Today the Mayor of Seoul opened the Skygarden, a 983-meter elevated walkway designed by MVRDV which utilizes a formerly abandoned highway in the center of the South Korean capital. Located in Seoul's Central Station district, the 16-meter-high linear park features a living catalog of Korea's indigenous plants, featuring over 24,000 individual plants from 228 species and sub-species. The Skygarden is known in Korean as Seoullo 7017, a name which references the Korean for "Seoul Street," and the 1970 and 2017, the years in which the structure was originally built and subsequently transformed.

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It happened in the middle of the night: the stealth whitewashing of 5Pointz, Long Island City's unofficial graffiti museum. In 2013 owner Jerry Wolkoff, of G&M Realty, wanted the building razed in order to erect new luxury condominiums, and the artists sued to preserve their work. A judge denied the artists' request and Wolkoff had the murals destroyed under cover of darkness, ostensibly to prevent them from attaining landmark status. Though graffiti was born as a subversive act, these artists had painted with Wolkoff's permission since 1993 and had turned the warehouse into “the world's premiere graffiti mecca” and the largest legal aerosol art space in the United States. This was a serious betrayal.

This article was originally published by Archipreneur as "The 10 Most Important Lessons Learned in 25 Years of Architecture Practice."

The article is an expansion on one part of Archipreneur's interview with Craig Applegath, Founding Principal of DIALOG’s Toronto Studio. The architect spoke from his experience of running a 150-person practice and listed 10 tips for archipreneurs interested in starting their own business. Archipreneur shares that list here.

When I first started my own practice I thought everyone wanted to run their own practice. It turns out not. Most people just want to work in a great practice run by someone else. But for those who are real archipreneurs – and you know who you are – there is nothing so thrilling and fun as starting your own business; and nothing so scary and anxiety producing as starting your own business! They are the flip side of the same coin. But in terms of general advice for people starting their own practice or business here are ten key lessons I have learned over the past twenty-five years of practice: