The BDA (the As­so­ci­a­tion of Ger­man Ar­chi­tects) com­prises around 5,000 free­lance ar­chi­tects and ur­ban plan­ners, who stand for qual­ity and per­sonal in­tegrity and were for these rea­sons called into the as­so­ci­a­tion. It acts at dif­fer­ent lev­els within the Fed­er­a­tion, in state or­gan­i­sa­tions and re­gional groups to pro­mote “the mis­sion” of ar­chi­tec­ture and build­ing cul­ture. The new web­site is in­tended as a com­mon plat­form for these as­so­ci­a­tions and groups. The main con­cern was to show “good” ar­chi­tec­ture – in other words, vi­su­ally strik­ing and at­trac­tive, with a fo­cus on the mul­ti­fac­eted sub­ject of ar­chi­tec­ture. Be­sides its func­tion as an in­for­ma­tion and ex­change plat­form for the in­di­vid­ual mem­bers, it was im­por­tant to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion to the pub­lic, e.g., con­struc­tion clients and ar­chi­tects, on the work of the BDA. The com­plex struc­ture had to be de­signed to be sim­ple and user-friendly. A fur­ther im­por­tant cri­te­rion was that the web­site has to be main­tained by many mem­bers/​​ed­i­tors. A sim­ple con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem was re­quired, with the abil­ity to share con­tent both in­ter­nally as well as ex­ter­nally.

The DAZ (Ger­man Ar­chi­tec­ture Cen­tre) is a lab­o­ra­tory of ideas, a place of ex­change, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and de­bate. Through work­shops, ex­hi­bi­tions, dis­cus­sions, film evenings and book pre­sen­ta­tions ar­chi­tects, ur­ban plan­ners, artists, cit­i­zens, users or crit­ics dis­cuss cur­rent is­sues in ar­chi­tec­ture, space pro­duc­tion and ur­ban so­ci­ety. The new web­site aims to pre­sent this idea of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing ar­chi­tec­ture. In ad­di­tion to the events pro­gramme, dif­fer­ent top­ics are clus­tered and edited un­der spe­cific head­lines. Three columns are lay­ered on top of each other in or­der to en­able quick and in­tu­itive ori­en­ta­tion. The web­site de­sign pre­sents an ag­ile lay­out con­cept with flex­i­ble im­age frames.