Questions & Answers

Archilovers is the first real social network for architects, designers lovers of architecture.

It is an international platform, totally free, with boundless space and no constraints, where you can post projects, exchange opinions and interests, get to know designers and architects and create your professional network.

It is the first online application allowing you to manage both your own professional profile and that of your design office, of your company, of your occasional team. An open community that is based on real collaborations, professional interactions and networks.

But it is also simply a large online library where you can browse amongst contemporary architecture projects, designers of international fame but above all small design offices spread out here and there all over the world, which will surprise you for their quality and creativity.

Apart from these basic functions which it shares with the most widespread social networks, Archilovers marks a turning point in how architecture and design are communicated and “consumed”.

“Tag the products!” is this application's pay off. Like on Facebook you can tag your friends in the photos, on archilovers then tag the products that you have chosen for your projects. Some already say that it is fantastic. It seems a simple technical detail, actually it is a real turning point in how architecture is communicated and exploited. Now, every time we browse the photos of a project, we can finally find out what the product used is called, look at its technical fact sheet and contact the manufacturer.
On Archilovers you can tag both the most common products and less famous products like niche products, technical products or products designed especially for that application or handmade products with hypertext links. At last no geographical limits!
Archilovers is indeed linked to archiproducts.com, the largest international website for architecture and design products, which belongs to the same network as Archilovers, which anybody can access and publish their catalogues.

On Archilovers you can, therefore, express yourself professionally by choosing the most innovative, beautiful and intelligent products. Then, maybe your projects will enter manufacturers' reference-books.

And then there are the albums! For the first time your project can be put into one or more topic albums, so that other users consult your profile for different reasons from simply project type or location. An example? If you have designed a beautiful internal staircase, you can inform our editorial staff and they will graphically indicate your project in the relevant album “internal staircases” and all the visitors interested in this topic will have another reason for discovering your project and maybe contacting you for new jobs or potential collaborations.

Archilovers' mission is to promote socialisation and let you communicate but above all to find new opportunities, multiply possibilities and expand the network.

The social platform on Archilovers is similar to that of Facebook, in terms of operation and concept: instant messaging, mail, notifications, creating groups, love and unlove, basically everything you need to interact and create networks on various levels with your professional community. However, unlike the other professional social networks, on Archilovers you can also talk about yourself through your personal attitudes, your travels, your photos, your stories and your videos. No limits.

Because we want archilovers to be your favourite space, forever.

What are you waiting for? Create your profile and begin your experience!

1. Profile
Free registration to Archilovers gives you a personal area where you can manage all your data, update it, publish your projects and interact with the social platform.

Your profile is public, visible to everybody from the homepage of Achilovers under the item PEOPLE, or amongst the results of a search performed on the site. Your fact sheet and your projects are also indexed on Google, so that they will appear at the top of the list of results.
Your designer fact sheet is the place where you can describe your work in detail, by specifying your professional activity, your interests and entering the keywords which will be used as search indexes of your profile. You can indicate your interest in receiving collaboration proposals and provide your contact data (mobile, social network, personal websites, etc..) so that other designers can communicate with you. You can upload photos, videos, exchange messages with other lovers, follow their activities, create teams (profiles administered both by you and by your collaborators) and publish your projects in complete and interactive fact sheets.

2. Project
The project fact sheet is the showcase of your works, as they progress or still in the design phase. You can publish information regarding projects you have written, co-written or which you are in some way professionally involved, respecting copyright and privacy. There is no limit to the number of projects that you can publish. Your project fact sheets are accessible from the homepage of Archilovers under the item “Project”, or amongst the results of a search, or directly from your profile. For each project, you can add an unlimited number of photos, media, renderings, drawings and other material in various formats that can be downloaded. The project data sheet lets you add a detailed text description of the work with no minimum number of characters, as well as filling in several fields for the technical specifications: year and status of the works, reference construction type, details of customer, building company, costs and dimensions of the project. You can associate several keywords to each project which will contribute to indexing the fact sheet, the project is geolocalised on the map and all the images can be viewed in a full screen gallery. For each photo you can tag one or more materials, construction elements or products and you can reference your work using stories and experiences of use written by you and by others.

The project fact sheet has no space limits for uploading photos and multimedia files and exploits all the social networking tools: comments, posts, tags, love button and the facebook like button.

3. Social interactions
Archilovers is a social network with interactions to permit exchange and communication amongst registered users. Architecture is a passion for archilovers, and like becomes love. Designers or projects which you decide to Fol(love), are those which you like and you are interested in following; you will receive a reminder of the updates concerning them directly on your wall. But finally you will also be free to express a negative opinion about what you dislike, you can say it with a simple un(love).

Each object published by the other lovers may be commented, you can write messages on the other walls, invite and be invited to become a member of a Team Profile or of a Project Team.

On Archilovers you can connect your projects with the products and materials used in it and present in the archiproducts.com database, by tagging them in the photographs you have published.

Archilovers interacts with Facebook and Twitter.
Indeed login is simplified using Facebook Connect, while the “like” and “tweet” buttons let you publish you appreciation directly on your Facebook profile or Twitter channel.

4. Search
Archilovers provides you with all the instruments necessary for performing effective and quick searches amongst the more than 30,920 projects and more than 109,535 designers published.
A large number of non exclusive and combinable filters are at your disposal so that you can refine your search. The projects envisage filters for: place, type, prevailing structure and state of the work; designers, on the other hand can be filtered by: place, activity and profession.

A further instrument of visibility, and thus searching the projects, is the presence of the featured projects, that is those highlighted for you by the Archilovers editorial office every day.

5. Tag topics
The projects can be catalogued within three albums: elements, materials and themes. Each one of these has sub-categories, with a list of possible choices. Associating the project to one or more albums is performed by adding a tag to the individual photos, by selecting the area of the image with most relevance to the chosen topic.
The project is thus also profiled according to the aspects which you wanted to highlight and will appear in the preview page of each album it is registered in. In terms of research, the tag topics tool provides a further filter for cataloguing the projects on the basis of the relevance that each one has and which you might need to find.

Tag topics is an absolute innovation of Archilovers.

6. Tag products
The products used can be tagged on the photos published in the project data sheets. The tag links the photo to the Archiproducts database, which already contains more than 25,000 catalogues. In this case, the link from the products refers you to a detailed product fact sheet already published on Archiproducts. However, if the product that you wish to tag is not yet in the database, you can still tag it, by entering the essential details: name, manufacturer, description and a link.

The product tag is an absolute innovation of Archilovers.

7. Team Profile and Project Team
Archilovers will give you the opportunity of creating a Team Profile, where you can add all the designers who collaborate with you. You can specify the team type, choosing from: company, technical office, project team, enterprise or supplier. As the founder you can invite other members and decide whether to make them administrators: in this way they will have the same access to publishing the content. The Team Profile also envisages the possibility of setting the presence of a member to visible/invisible, for instance if you want to delegate the job of monitoring/management/updating the profile to a figure outside the professional team.

Otherwise, if you wish to report the collaboration of a colleague within one of your projects, you can do it directly from inside your project fact sheet. In this way you create a Project Team, where you can specify the role of the designers invited to become members and decide whether they are to be appointed administrators of the fact sheet (only of the fact sheet and not of the profile then). In this case the colleague you invited will not appear as your collaborator in all your works, but only for the specific one in which you have indicated the presence. Both in Team Profile and in Project Team, the designer invited must accept the invitation before appearing in the team.

8. Stories
Stories are articles, posts, reviews that all Archilovers users can write on their own projects, on other projects and designers, on experiences of product use, on events or even only on things connected to architecture, like travel or curiosities. Stories are like articles of a blog, but exploit social interaction, connections and social networks. When writing a story you can add an external video, link and image, connect/quote projects, designers, topics, products and other stories in it.
Quotes appear in an article in text format as clickable links. The story thus becomes a surfable hypertext, a combination of content which is different but connected by a common theme. You can comment, share and follow a story just like you are used to doing with all the other Archilovers content. The advantage for you will be that of constructing a rich and dynamic blog, with interactive content and the possibility of exchange with other users.

9. The Archipassport network
Archilovers is part of the largest network for architecture, building and design ARCHIPASSPORT:
Archiproducts.com
The most complete search engine for architecture and design, with fact sheets and links to the manufacturers. (worldwide, 11 languages)

Archilovers.com
The social network for architects, designers and lovers of architecture. (worldwide, 11 languages)

Archiportale.com
The Italian web magazine of architecture and design, which publishes news about projects, designers and prompt updates on all the events/calls for tender/competitions/results in Italy and abroad. (Italy)

Edilportale.com
The search engine for the building industry, constantly updated with news, laws, events, regulations, calls for tender of operators of the sector. (Italy)

BlocchiCad.com
The portal for CAD designers in Italy and abroad which publishes CAD object libraries, blocks, technical details, textures, raster images and other digital content. (Italy)