A precedent is evidence of thinking. It is only evidence if someone can follow it back. Without the source it is a picture you liked, and nothing on the page tells a tutor the difference between a picture you liked and a building you understood.
01Four lines, written at the moment you save
Check 10 on the project-start checklist says to save the link, not just the image. Four lines, typed while the tab is still open:
- The URL — the page you were on, not the image file.
- The project and the architect — the building’s name, and the practice.
- The year — of the building, not of the article.
- One line on why you saved it.
The last one is the one people skip and the only one that cannot be reconstructed. The others can be recovered with enough effort. Why you saved it cannot, because it was a thought you had for about four seconds. Six weeks later you will know it is a Zumthor. You will not know that what you wanted was the way the roof edge stops short of the wall.
That line also does a second job. It becomes the caption, more or less as written, when the image goes on a page. A caption and a credit set the same size in the same place on every spread are a paragraph style you make once and stop thinking about, which is one of the things the portfolio template would have to do. It is not built, and that page asks what it would be worth rather than selling it.
Keep the lines in a plain text file in the project folder, one line per image, with the image named to match — the same folder as everything else, which is the one folder you make in week one. A text file is not elegant and it opens on any machine in ten years, which no app can promise.
What you worked from shows a tutor how you’re thinking, an unsourced screenshot just shows you can scroll.
Check 10, the project-start checklist
02Where the image came from, and what each source costs
Not all sources are equally recoverable, and the differences are worth knowing before you have four hundred images.
| What you use | Good for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| The architect’s own site | The project name, the year, the team, and often the drawings. The most reliable version of the facts. | Only the flattering views. Photographer credits are buried or missing, and practice sites get rebuilt, taking every link you saved with them. |
| An architecture publication | Dezeen, ArchDaily, the Architects’ Journal. Drawings, dates and a stable page you can cite, and usually the photographer’s name. | The text is largely what the practice supplied. Drawings are cropped and redrawn for the page, so measuring off them is a mistake. |
| Pinterest or Instagram | Fast, and good at showing you something you would not have searched for. | A pin usually links to another pin. Captions are copied from other captions and are often wrong about the architect, the country and the decade. |
| A book or a journal | The best provenance there is. Page number, publisher, year, and someone edited it. | You have to scan it, the scan is low resolution, and library access ends when the course does. Slow at the moment you want to be fast. |
| An AI image | Nothing here that a precedent does. It can help you describe an atmosphere to yourself. | There is no building, no architect and nothing to cite. It cannot be a precedent, because it is not evidence that anyone built or thought anything. |
A Pinterest board is not a source. It is a bookmark of a bookmark, and following one back often lands on another board or a dead blog. When a pin has already broken, the recovery route is reverse image search: save the image, then drag the file into Google Images or Google Lens and read what comes back. It does not always work. It works often enough to be the first thing you try.
03Looked at, or used
There are two kinds of precedent in any project and the pages rarely say which is which.
One you looked at. It set the temperature of the project, or it made you want to do the scheme at all, and none of its moves are in your drawings. The other you used. A section was resolved a particular way and you resolved yours the same way, and the drawing on your page is a direct descendant of it.
Saying which is which is the thing that reads as thinking. “I looked at this and did not take anything from it” is a legitimate sentence and a confident one. “The stair section here follows Lacaton and Vassal’s” is a stronger one, because it names a debt and shows you know exactly what you borrowed. What reads badly is nine images and no statement about any of them.
How the credit is formatted is your school’s business, not mine. Schools use different systems, and the guide that tells you which one is usually filed in the same document as the assessment criteria, which is worth finding for other reasons and is check 02. If you cannot find it, ask, in one email, in week one. Nobody has ever thought less of a student for asking how to reference something.
04Rights, in one honest paragraph
A portfolio submitted for assessment, with sources credited, sits in a different position from a portfolio you publish on a website or email to a practice. Copyright in a photograph of a building belongs to whoever took the photograph, not to the architect and not to the site you found it on, and crediting is not the same thing as having permission. The habit that covers you in both cases is the same: credit everything, and know which images in your portfolio are yours. If you are ever asked to take something down, you can, because you know where it is and where it came from. This is a working habit, not legal advice, and if you are being paid for the work it is worth asking someone who does this properly.
In practice
If you are reading this in week nine with four hundred unsourced screenshots, do not try to fix all of them. Open the portfolio, or the moodboard you use, and pick the five images you would be asked about in a crit. Run each one through Google Lens. Write the four lines, including the why line, even if you are reconstructing it.
Then stop. The other three hundred and ninety-five are a mood, not an argument, and they were never going to be captioned. Start the new habit on the next image you save, which is the only one you can still catch at the moment the tab is open.
Open the last image you saved, find the page it came from, and write the four lines under it. Then leave the text file open for the rest of the project, because the whole habit is that it costs ten seconds while the tab is still there.