AGGREGAT

Client work under NDA proves you can hit someone else’s brief. It cannot show taste, because every decision in it was negotiated. I wanted one piece with no client and no compromise, on a subject unforgiving enough that a weak layout would be obvious — architecture, where the audience reads grids for a living.

The practice is invented, so there was no brief to hide behind and the constraints had to be self-imposed. No photography budget, which meant working with stock and letting cropping and scale do the work. And an architecture practice is judged on its writing as much as its images, so the copy had to hold up as copy — eighteen fictional built works, each with a position, not just a name.

Astro rather than the Next.js and Payload stack behind CVIETA and this portfolio. That stack is the right answer when somebody has to edit the site after I leave; nobody edits AGGREGAT, so a CMS and a server runtime would have been weight with nothing to show for it. A content-driven multi-page site should ship HTML and almost no JavaScript. The layout is a Swiss editorial system — Archivo at display scale against Azeret Mono metadata rails, an oklch palette, generous full-bleed plates. A keyboard toggle draws the underlying grid over the page, so the system is inspectable rather than merely claimed. The centrepiece is one project broken into three moves — find what cannot move, take one thing away, add nothing you cannot remove — which is the case-study structure I now use everywhere, including here.