Branco Del Rio Arquitectos

2019

Web Design, Web Development

Architecture is a slow discipline. A project can take years from brief to completion, and even then, it is rarely finished in the way a website is finished. It accumulates new work, new recognition, new collaborators, new ideas. The website for Branco Del Rio had to be built for that kind of time.

The studio, founded by João Branco and Paula Del Rio and based in Coimbra (Portugal), works across housing, public space and installation. Their practice is precise and quietly ambitious - published in Domus, Dezeen and ArchDaily, recognised by the FAD Awards and the Mies van der Rohe Award, exhibited at the Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra. The body of work is substantial. The site had to hold it without feeling like an archive.

The central challenge was structural. Branco Del Rio is not only a portfolio of projects, it is also a studio with an institutional life: news, publications, lectures, awards, exhibitions. These two things needed to coexist clearly, without one overwhelming the other. We designed a navigation that separates them cleanly while keeping the experience coherent. The work is always the centre, and everything else gives it context.

The design took its lead from the architecture itself. Restrained, precise, attentive to proportion. We made no decisions that the buildings wouldn’t justify. The images are given space to be read carefully. The typography is functional and exact. Nothing performs.

The result is a site that can grow for years without losing its shape - new projects added, new editions of the awards list updated, new collaborators credited - while remaining recognisably itself.