LibGuides: Sustainable Design: Finding Plans and Drawings

Library Resources

Artstor This link opens in a new window 300 collections composed of over 2 million images. These curated images have been rights-cleared for use in education and research — you are free to use them in classroom instruction and handouts, presentations, student assignments, and other noncommercial educational and scholarly activities.
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals This link opens in a new window Content includes: Archaeology, Architecture, Architectural design, City planning, Furniture and decoration, Historic preservation, History of architecture, Interior design, Landscape architecture

Some more places to look

Philadelphia Architects and Buildings
A free, publicly searchable Internet database of architectural and historical information and images for 35,000+ structures, mostly in Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties, including all those on the Philadelphia Historical Commission list of significant buildings, and the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission’s inventory of historic structures.
Historic Amercian Buildings Survey
Limit your search to "surveys only" to get the best results. Make sure to click on Images, Data Pages, and Measured Drawings if available as plans may be found in any of the documents.

Use Avery

Use limits in Avery to return results of journal articles that have plans and drawings in them.

Next to "Document Feature," select the types of images you would like to find.

You'll receive search results for articles that contain the type of images you selected.

Under each article"s indexing details, you'll see the type images included in each article.

Internet Resources

Aga Khan Visual Archive
The Aga Khan Visual Archive (AKVA) consists of over 120,000 slides and digital images of architecture, urbanism, and the built environment in the Islamic world, donated by students, scholars, and architectural firms.
Alvar Aalto's Architecture
This database of Alvar Aalto's architecture is based on the work made in Alvar Aalto Museum with the help of Göran Schildt. All the drawings and photographs are owned by the Museum archives
Luna Commons - Architectural Images
A collection of over 47,000 images of architecture, archaeological sites, gardens, parks and works of art. Low resolution images are available for free on this site.
SPIRO - Architectural Slide Library Online Image Catalog
Only small images can be found here. If you find images here, you will have to look at the Source field to see if you can access the book or article to scan a hi-res copy for yourself.
archINFORM
This online-database for international architecture includes more than "9000 built and unrealized projects from various architects and planners" and focuses on 20th century architecture.
Cities/ Buildings Database
(University of Washington) This database contains more than 5000 images of buildings and cities from around the world.
The Great Buildings Collection
This site provides a "gateway to architecture around the world and across history documents a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, with 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures of all kinds."