Schwarzplan.eu — a map library for architecture and urban design
Figure Ground Plans & Site Plans for Architects and Urban Planners
Drawn for you, not traced by you: no hunting for geodata, no clipping, no redrawing in QGIS. Hundreds of figure-ground plans, site plans and maps — true to scale, in layers, instant download.
Why SCHWARZPLAN.eu
572
Plans available
ALL-ACCESS
99 € / year
FORMAT
FORMAT
DXF
Free
53 free plans
Bundles
Drucke
Schwarzpläne als Leinwand, Poster und Tapete.
Basics
What a figure-ground plan is — and what you get here
A figure-ground plan reduces a city to its essentials: built fabric in black, everything else white. No labels, no colour, no symbols. What remains is the figure of the urban plan — block edges, courtyards, rows, freestanding buildings. The convention goes back to Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome and is still the fastest way to compare the density, grain and scale of two places.
You need one wherever a design has to show its context: in a competition entry, in pre-assessment, in a portfolio, in a lecture. A site plan does the same one scale level down — with street space, greenery and water, as the immediate context for your own plot.
The plans in this catalogue are built from OpenStreetMap data that we clean editorially and rework by hand. That is the difference from a raw export: buildings are closed polygons, streets, water, greenery and railways sit on separate layers, gaps and duplicate geometry are gone. A generator export looks similar at first glance and fails in CAD at the first boolean operation. The catalogue currently covers 343 cities in 48 countries; 53 plans are free and can be checked before you buy.
Official data is covered by a separate tool: the cadastral map shows parcel boundaries and parcel numbers from the official land register — free and without sign-up. For a building application itself, an official site plan from a licensed surveyor or the cadastral office remains mandatory; no catalogue plan is meant to replace it.
Every purchase includes commercial use: competitions, client projects, presentations, publications. The download starts immediately after payment — no account, no subscription.
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