About the Architectural Knowledge Library

307 design directives sourced from authoritative publications across 10 organizations.
23 plan symbols per published CAD standards.
146 materials from manufacturer specifications and trade references.

All three parts are cross-linked: a directive points to the symbols it governs, a symbol points to the directives that apply to it, a material points to its applicable symbols and governing directives. See the unified search to traverse the graph.

Almost an Architect is currently a test application. We source design directives from freely available editions of authoritative publications. That means:

• Government publications are current and public — Virginia 2021 USBC, HUD guides, Alexandria zoning, federal Fair Housing manuals, FEMA P-2325.
• Industry publications use the most recent freely- circulated edition, which is sometimes notthe current paid edition. NKBA Kitchen & Bath Planning Guidelines 2nd ed (2015) is on multiple cabinet-company websites; the current 4th ed (2022) is paid and adds support-spaces guidelines we don't encode.
• Older standards from Internet Archive are used as backup reference (e.g., 2018 IRC scan), not as the primary authority.
• Pre-1928 plan books are public domain (Sears, Aladdin) — used as reference for our catalog plan recreations.

For commercial / production use, we will purchase current paid editions and verify every directive against them. The total upgrade cost is $340 based on current shop pricing — see the detailed upgrade list below.

Every directive in the library carries source.organization, source.publication, source.edition, and source.sectionRef fields so the exact citation is always available. Where the source is freely accessible, the directive's detail page links to the PDF.

We currently track 15 authoritative sources across 10 organizations:

• City of Alexandria, VA (1 source): Current (Municode-hosted)
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (1 source): May 2023 (FEMA P-2325)
• International Code Council (publisher) (1 source): 2018
• NKBA (official) (2 sources): 2023, 2022
• National Kitchen and Bath Association (1 source): 2nd ed (2015)
• North American Construction Company (Aladdin) (1 source): 1916
• Pacific Northwest National Lab / US DOE (1 source): Continuously updated
• Sears, Roebuck and Co. (historical) (1 source): 1925
• US Department of Housing and Urban Development (2 sources): Most recent free-PDF release, 1996 revised 1998
• Virginia DHCD (4 sources): 2021, 2021, 2021, 2021

Alexandria, VA is our development jurisdiction for local zoning. The catalog plans, default cost estimates, and constraint solver use Virginia 2021 USBC as the residential code baseline.

Other jurisdictions can be added via the admin upload workflow: drop a local zoning ordinance PDF into lib/library/sources/documents/, register it in MANIFEST.ts, extract directives tagged with that jurisdiction. The directive infrastructure supports per-jurisdiction applicability filters.

The complete commercial-grade source library — every paid edition of every source we currently use the free version of — costs approximately $340:

• $240 — 2024 IRC
  Currently using: 2018 International Residential Code for One- and Two-Family Dwellings (2018) — Replace with current edition for commercial use.
• $100 — NKBA Kitchen & Bath Planning Guidelines with Support Spaces and Accessibility, 4th edition (2022)
  Currently using: NKBA Kitchen & Bathroom Planning Guidelines with Access Standards, 2nd Edition (2nd ed (2015)) — Adds support-spaces guidelines (mudroom, laundry, home office, gym) not in 2nd ed.

We apply a strict reference-not-training rule: we do not use restricted-license academic datasets for floor-plan analysis or model training. Those datasets ship under non-commercial licenses (CC BY-NC, research-only) which would conflict with our commercial direction. Instead, we read the published research that describesthose datasets' findings and cite the research.

Datasets we deliberately do NOT use:

• FloorPlanCAD — CC BY-NC, non-commercial only
• CubiCasa5K — CC BY-NC, non-commercial only
• RPLAN (Wu 2019) — research access only
• ResPlan — academic terms restrictive
• MLStructFP — research access only
• CubiGraph5K — inherits CubiCasa5K license
• MSD (Modified Swiss Dwellings) — research only
• LIFULL HOMES — institutional access only

This is enforced automatically: the test test:research-no-restricted-datascans the entire codebase on every commit and fails the build if any of these datasets' URLs, filenames, or training-loop imports appear.

• Research bibliography — every cited paper, book, code, and standard
• The library overview — directives, symbols, materials
• Unified search — query across all three parts