A clever team of architects in Oslo, Norway, mocks up full-size blueprints using a shared flat concrete courtyard behind their office, allowing colleagues and clients alike to test-drive designs in person during the schematic and design development process.

Vardehaugen Arkitekter has used white tape to draft everything from houses and cabins to offices and pavilions, sharing the results on Instagram with enthusiastic fans and followers.

Like their architecture in general, the white-on-dark drawings are minimalist (in terms of designs and colors) but effective, using standard blueprinting conventions legible to professionals and laypeople alike.

The movie Dogville comes to mind, its props simple and its rooms mapped out on the floor, defined by invisible walls and doors left largely to the viewer’s imagination and extrapolation of a basic barebones blueprint.

Inspired by detailed three-dimensional maps of Hong Kong subway stations, a New York artist has painstakingly documented and rendered a gorgeous series of helpful underground diagrams.

Exiting a subway network can be a disorienting experience. While stair signage and sidewalk compasses can help, anyone navigating based on landmarks or other surface features is lost. Project Subway NYC by Candy Chan is a step in the right direction. Using pen, paper and a camera, she meticulously recorded directions and relative positions of tracks and lines, referring to Google and MTA resources as a baseline.

She then took the results into AutoCAD, verified those drawings in person, and proceeded to model and render the results using Rhino, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to produce 3D maps. Her explorations have helped her identify pain points for navigating these multilevel stations.

From CityLab: “The first batch includes five stops along Broadway: Columbus Circle, Times Square, Herald Square, Madison Square, and Union Square. But Chan hopes to do more, in Manhattan as well as in the outer boroughs. Since the project just launched two weeks ago, she’s gauging people’s reactions to decide which stations to explore next.”

Still, 3D maps may not in themselves be a solution – murals, screens, signage or other indicators tied to visual landmarks from the world above would be a welcome addition for those who cannot read English or simply navigate using different means and methods.

This stunning blueprint-inspired poster takes you on a visual tour of 90 celebrated structures around the world, highlighting architectural achievements from the Greek Parthenon and Buckingham Palace to Taipei 101 and the Freedom Tower, “a lineup of landmark landmarks and eminent edifices erected and perfected throughout history.”

An 18-by-24-inch print available from Pop Chart Lab for around $30, this frame-worthy work of art and design may solve your architectural gifting needs for the foreseeable future. The juxtapositions of old and new, Classical and Modernist, help show off the rich historical variety of buildings and monuments. Some structures made the cut for being canonical classics, while others are record-setters or unusual examples of unique typologies. Rendering them all in a way that would make them consistent but bring out their different characters was also a challenge for the creators.

More from the creators: “Each breathtaking building has been beautifully hand-illustrated to scale in blueprint-like style—and is accompanied by notations for location, height, year of construction, and architectural mode. For the serious sight-seer, history hobbyist, or architectural aficionado, this collection of captivating cornerstones is sure to tower above all others. Using 100 lb. archival stock certified by The Forest Stewardship Council, this poster is pressed on an offset lithographic press with vegetable-based inks in Long Island City.”