Arc Studio Website
A 98 Lighthouse score. Sub-1s load time. An architecture portfolio that performs as well as it looks.
The
Brief.
Arc Architecture is one of the most awarded studios in Europe. Their old website was a Flash-era relic — beautiful photography buried under slow load times, broken mobile layouts, and a CMS that the team had stopped using because it was too painful. They needed a site that matched the quality of their work.
“Architecture photography is large. Unavoidably, necessarily large. The tension between visual fidelity and performance is acute — you can't compress a hero image into oblivion and call it a portfolio. We had to find a way to serve stunning, full-resolution photography at sub-1-second load times.”
Progressive Image Architecture
We built a custom image pipeline — AVIF with WebP fallback, responsive srcsets, blur-up placeholders, and lazy loading with IntersectionObserver. The result: full-resolution images that appear to load instantly.
Scroll-Driven Storytelling
Architecture is experienced through movement and sequence. We built a scroll-driven narrative system where each project unfolds as you move through the page — images reveal, text fades, and the spatial quality of the work comes through.
Headless CMS Integration
The team needed to update the site themselves. We built on Sanity CMS with a custom studio configuration — the team can add a new project, update photography, and publish in under 10 minutes.