Scale Grid

Architect Scale · 1:500

1:500 master plan grid - every 10 mm cell equals 5 metres.

Scale Grid 10 mm pitch 1:500 12 sheet variants

About Architect Scale · 1:500

A master-planning grid in which each 10 mm cell represents a 5 m × 5 m patch of ground. Big enough to put a city block on a single sheet without losing the ability to measure street widths, building footprints and setback distances directly off the page. Further reading: A practitioner reading list covers the standards lineage in more depth.

Standards lineage

Preferred scale per ISO 5455:1979 for master plans.

A short history

1:500 has been the European urban-design default since the École des Beaux-Arts master-planning tradition; it gives roughly the same coverage as the imperial 1" = 40' scale used in Anglo-American civic plans.

Where designers reach for it

  • Master-plan and urban-design studies
  • Civic-scale landscape design
  • Brownfield redevelopment block layouts
  • Transport-interchange and station-area planning

Printing this grid

Every variant on this page is delivered as a vector SVG with physical millimetre dimensions baked into the file, so a compliant printer driver will reproduce it at exact 1:1 scale by default. Choose the sheet size that matches your printer tray, set scaling to 100 % (never "fit to page"), and verify with the calibration check on our how-to-print guide. Buyer's guide: Comparing the major architectural scale rulers can help you pick the right physical scale rule to use over the printed grid.

Available sheet sizes (12)