With more than 3,000 high-resolution digital objects, the Design Archive website offers a window onto a century's worth of design competitions staged by Van Alen Institute since its founding in 1894. These programs have nurtured generations of architects and urban thinkers, while bringing design excellence to the built environment of cities and sites around the world.

What you'll find here is a selection of competition entries on themes that range from cultural and residential structures to waterfront plazas, new town centers, and large-scale urban plans. The archive currently spans from early submissions for the Paris Prize in Architecture (1904), which supported study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for its annual recipient, to Envisioning Gateway (2007), VAI's competition to reimagine the future of urban nature.

To search the Design Archive, simply enter a keyword in the search box on the upper-right-hand corner of the window. The more specific the search, the more relevant your results will be. You may enter text, dates, or a combination of terms.

The pull-down menus across the top of the window organize search results by pre-defined criteria.

At any time in your search, you may navigate to related content by clicking on linked criteria in the "Browsing By" search path below the pull-down menus, or by clicking on linked subject terms within an object page.