Research lab home page: a selected project

Architecture research lab

The website of a design research lab led by two celebrated architects and professors at the University of Michigan, holding projects from 2007 to today.

Client

Architects at the University of Michigan

What

Website, content migration, CMS, custom code

Platform

Framer

Built

2026

View live site

The brief

An architecture and research practice with a deep archive: buildings, prototypes, territories, exhibitions, books and awards. The old site held about 190 pages and 3,000 image files. The new one had to carry all of it, stay precise and factual, and load fast.

Research lab home page: Research, Vision, Transformation, Realization

What was built

Fifty-three projects, seventy-three publications, fifty-seven recognition entries, sixteen news stories and eighty-two team members, migrated into ten CMS collections.

Every project page carries its cover, the full gallery in its original order, a click-through photo viewer, films where they exist and Previous / Next links. Empty fields simply don’t show.

Under the hood

Sixty-nine book covers trimmed so the publications sit in even 3:4 frames, six, three or two to a row. CMYK and Adobe RGB originals converted to sRGB so nothing washes out on screen.

The page-load jump removed (a layout shift of 0.0001), one vertical rhythm of 128, 96 and 72 pixels across desktop, iPad and phone, and a phone menu rebuilt in custom code.

Research lab: publications, book covers in a fluid grid

Why it works

It stays quiet so the work can speak: big images, small type, and every fact checked against its source. Every photograph is credited.

One layout, three breakpoints: desktop, tablet and phone in Framer.

← Back to all work

View live site