Architextures, our founding story

In April 2025 we celebrate 5 years since the launch of the Architextures web app. The initial idea for the platform came from my experience working as an architect and requiring customised material assets for projects we worked on. Existing online libraries were limited; often you would find a material that's a close match but other elements like the pattern or dimensions would not be suitable. The alternative, creating them manually, was time consuming and in the context of working through a construction package not always feasible.

In answer to this, I imagined a tool with a variety of visual parameters that can be adjusted at the click of a button. This would make it possible to do in seconds what might have taken an hour in an image editor. A valuable upside of this speed is that it makes it possible to approach materiality with more consideration for surface design as it lets the user to test and visualise more iterations with flexibility for customisation. This means we no longer need to settle for images found online that don't align with the design intent.

Egyptian jar of andesite porphyry

In parallel to this practical functionality, there was a desire to organise information about the materials we use in architecture and design into a digital resource accessible to designers around the world. These two ideas eventually combined and the spark to begin building the platform came during a trip to the British Museum in 2019 where I encountered two Egyptian jars, one of limestone breccia and the other andesite porphyry. The latter in particular, I found extremely visually impressive with a matte black, volcanic rock surface scattered with bright white feldspar. It resembles a monochromatic terrazzo but is instead completely natural, produced by Earth's geological processes. Development began the day after this visit and 9 months later we shipped the initial launch.

We then began working with material manufacturers to help them digitise their materials, making them available in formats that architects need to produce construction drawings. Ultimately, being able to specify the materials in our library on design projects has many advantages for both designers and suppliers and our focus now is helping designers find the information they need to make this possible. We're working on features to bring more technical data about the materials and filter results based on advanced properties including sustainability criteria.

Alongside this, we also recently introduced Stories to the site, a new section where we investigate the stories behind the materials we use, covering where they come from, how they are produced, applied and more.

Ryan Canning is an architect and designer from Glasgow, Ryan founded Architextures in 2020.