Study Guides: Architecture: Search for Information

Finding books & articles

A good place to begin searching is in the Library catalogue. Use the Library catalogue to find books and journal articles on your topic.

Library Catalogue The library catalogue is a good place to start your search.

For detailed instructions on using the Library catalogue, watch this video:

Tips for searching...

Books

If you can find a book all about a building, an architect, or an architectural process then that's ideal, because books tend to contain more information than any other type of literature. Use general or broad terms to do such searches.

Journal articles

Journal articles deal with more specific topics, such as a profile of an architectural design firm, or a discussion on the use of sustainable materials in new Australian homes

Example:

A Library Catalogue search for the keywords: Seagram Building found this book & peer reviewed journal article about the building.

Evaluating your results

Not all the information you get from a search will be useful. A successful search will show results relevant to your topic. If your results are not relevant go back and try different keywords in your search.

To evaluate whether your source is of sufficient quality use the C.C.O.W. Test. Click on the letters of the acronym to learn more:

Advanced Searching

Having tested a simple search like Seagram Building, we can now try a Boolean search. This one is:
"Seagram Building" AND (design OR morphology OR construction)

Again, the intention here is to find more topical material and to bring articles from lower down in the results list up to the top of the search so we can find them more easily

Notice that when you add the extra search terms it changes the top article hit in the search.

Other places to search

Using the same searches you've mapped our earlier, try using some of the key resources for architecture, like ProQuest, Taylor and Francis Online Journals and JSTOR. You'll find the results are different in each database. The picture below is one of the top hits from JSTOR.

ProQuest Proquest is a multidisciplinary database that is great for topics on architecture, design and art history. Contained within Proquest is the Avery Index, which lets you search for articles containing drawings. To learn how to use the Avery Index, see our Finding Building Plans guide.
Taylor and Francis Online Journals Taylor and Francis contains a rich collection of high quality academic writing on architectural theory, as well as technical writing on building and construction.
JSTOR JSTOR contains full text journal articles going back to the late 1800's. This scope of content makes it unique, and especially useful for research on older buildings.

Finding images

The requirement to find images for a building is common in architecture assignments. Mostly these images are found via Google image searches, though you can also use the image resources listed on the home page of this guide to find some good content, such as this photo of the Seagram Building interior from ArtStor.

Image credit: Stoller, E. (1958). Seagram building, interior, corner office [Photograph]. ArtStor. www.artstor.org

There's also a great talk by Mies van der Rohe in Pidgeon Digital where he talks at length about designing the Seagram Building.

If you need building plans, take a look at our Finding Building Plans guide (on the right of screen) where we show you how to find those too!

ArtStor High quality images from museum collections all over the world

Architecture: Search for Information