Purcell

Acclaimed heritage consultants and architects, Purcell, approached us to reimagine their portfolio website. The current site was no longer reflective of them as a practice, and they were looking for ways to better communicate their holistic approach with an easier navigation experience for website visitors.

Alongside that, they wanted to bring a selection of flagship projects to the fore, and showcase the innovation and detail that goes on behind the scenes of some of their biggest and boldest site transformations.

To really get under the skin of Purcell’s methodology, two of the Studio Treble team went on a site visit to Manchester Town Hall — a project undergoing a huge transformation by Purcell. We learned about the key areas of historical preservation, materiality and complexity of the work involved — carefully balancing the heritage with new improvements to the building. There’s nothing like exploring the upper most rooftops of a completely scaffolded site to give you an understanding of the process!

We identified a couple of sites that had two amazing stories to tell — Kresen Kernow and Tai Kwun — and these became our flagship projects. Working alongside Purcell’s team, we created 3D models of both of these sites from the group up, helping to give website visitors a better awareness of the scale and materiality of each.

Each animated model is controlled by the user’s scroll, allowing them to explore and navigate at their own pace and discover intricacies of buildings that they may not have ordinarily stumbled upon.

With Purcell’s previous website now approaching 7 years old, there was a real opportunity to bring the new site up to speed with the evolution of digital platforms. The site’s new infrastructure is cloud-based and much more environmentally conscious than hosting on traditional fuel-heavy servers. Not only that, but the benefits to site security and performance are greatly improved. This process included a content migration from the old site to the new, dramatically reducing the time spent by Purcell on content population ahead of site launch.

Communicating the before and after of a transformation was important, making sure the user could see a quick snapshot of a project if they didn’t have time to explore in detail. We developed a module that allowed the user to easily scroll between the old and the new, getting a clear understanding of the work Purcell had achieved.