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Andrew McCrea

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Every building that has city approval, has a set of Blueprints available for the public to look at. Just go down to your city planning office and ask.

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Do they have a website?

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Andrew McCrea

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I graduated with a degree in Architecture in 1988 and am currently employed with a Consulting Engineering firm in Nashville, Tennessee. We don't design theatres, but we do design Water and Waste Water Treatment Plants. Even on the sets of drawings we produce in our office, we use the services of a Civil Engineer, Enviromental Engineer, Architect, Mechanical Engineer, Electrical Engineer, and then various consultants specific to the type of facility we are designing. Architects either charge for their services for a price per square foot or a percentage of construction costs - (usually around 7% - 10%). The drawings produced in our office are drawn with "Microstation J", (which is very similar and compatible with Autocad). I have single sheets of plans on my computer that are well over 15 megs in size.

Building codes also play an important role in what we do. Many times people will find that it's more cost efficient to build a new facility than it is to retrofit an existing structure... especially when there's asbestos involved.

Blue Prints for a building of public occupancy are very specific for the particular building in which they where created for. Many elements of a building may be similar, but the structural components can vary widely.

Generally the plans and the design shown on the drawings remain the intelectual property of the Architect / Engineer. Copying another Architects drawing or design can lead to major lawsuits.

Like Ian said, most of the plans for all buildings are held for public inspection at the offices of the local building codes department, as well as places like "Construction Market Data" and the "Dodge Plans Rooms".

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Barry Floyd
Floyd Entertainment Group
Nashville, Tennessee
(Drive-In Theatre - Start-Up)

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How do people learn things. By studying examples of other peoples' work. From authors to filmmakers to architects. That's the entire purpose of copyrights and patents -- to make examples of the arts and sciences available to the public to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not to make it somehow wrong to study other people's work.

Barry is right though -- copyright does now cover architectural design. And, of course, copyright would cover the blueprints themselves. So you couldn't just scan in a set of blueprints without the permission of the architect who designed them, but there's nothing wrong with studying other people's blueprints to learn what goes into a theatre, so long as you understand that you can't copy the architecture without permission of the architect who designed it. It would be nice to locate, obtain permission, and scan some representative theatre blueprints though. Permission to put the blueprints on the web site would not include permission to build the building though.