Hald & Ostrowski
A Copenhagen architecture practice of fourteen that makes drawings for a living, and had a website of photographs. We built one from the drawing set: plans and sections first, at every scale, and the photographs after.
- Client
- Hald & Ostrowski Architects
- Year
- 2024
- Services
- Identity, Website
- Website
- haldostrowski.example
Case study
Hald & Ostrowski is a practice of fourteen architects in Copenhagen: schools, housing and one very small chapel. Like most architects' websites, theirs was a grid of photographs, taken on a sunny day after the building was finished. The partners' complaint was simple: the photographs show the weather. The drawings show the building.
What we did
Identity. A wordmark set in the same lettering the practice uses on its drawings' title blocks, so the website, the stationery and a sheet of A1 all carry the same name in the same way.
Website. Every project is built from its drawing set. The plan comes first, then the section, then the elevations, each one sharp at any size because the drawings are published as vectors, not pictures of them. Zoom into a section and the wall build-up is there to read. The photographs follow, in the order you would walk through the building.
Editing. The architects publish a project themselves, straight from the drawings they already export, and the scale bar, north point and title block come along with them.
What changed
The section through the chapel became the most shared page the practice has ever had, which nobody expected, least of all the engineer. Clients now arrive at a first meeting having read the drawings, and the meeting starts further along.
“Architects' websites show the photographs. Ours shows the drawings, which is what we actually make. Clients now arrive with a section printed out and a question written on it.”
