Landscape architecture firm Erz is striking out in a new direction with the launch of a new website that seeks to convey a sense of conviviality inherent to the practice’s work. Here Erz director Felicity Steers outlines how beauty is a product not just of space but of time.
The Erz portfolio includes huge urban strategies of entire new neighbourhoods, and intimate spaces for teaching preschool children; it includes therapeutic gardens for the NHS and cycle routes across Argyll; innovative modular kits for food-growing on derelict and vacant land and flagship heritage sites for the National Trust; skateparks and sculptures; flood remediation schemes and roof gardens. What all these places have in common is the desire to create conviviality – a shared life – between people, within all types of communities – and between humanity and the natural world. Our brief was to convey this strong philosophy of conviviality inherent in our work, and to create an easy to use and enticing showcase for a very wide range of projects. We also wanted to demonstrate the high calibre of our designs – we needed the website to look beautiful, and to be lighter and easier to navigate and to maintain than our previous one (a lovely design by Studio Suisse, but now a decade old).
Erz worked with several partners to realise our vision for the website –photographers Christopher Swan and David Cadzow, plus our inhouse photographer Kevin Jones, who do most of our photography; Julia Radcliffe at Ink Design who assisted with copywriting, proofreading and ensuring we had a coherent style; our artist/intern Rowan Roscher who has populated the site, supported by the in house team.
Most importantly we trusted the design of the website to digital development and creative agency DaySix. We have been working with designers DaySix, who have designed and built the website for us, for nearly three years. DaySix also worked with erz on the design of www.halogardens.eco, the official site for our Covid memorial project so we knew that they are very people focussed and creative in terms of planning and structuring websites that need to convey a strong message.
It is a real challenge to translate the idiosyncrasies of people, nature and place into a digital gallery space. Landscape architecture is four dimensional design working with time as well as space. We started with curation of projects and assimilation of the chosen projects into typologies that reflect workstreams at Erz: not by client type or scale, but by end user and type of space believing that this reflects our ethos of conviviality and community more effectively, for example: education and play, culture and heritage, housing and neighbourhood, health and care, art and installations…
Next, we worked with DaySix to build a plan for the website that encouraged exploration across these areas, with “loops” of information that lead you back to the menu of project typologies as you navigate. The website uses lots of fluid carousels or scrolls of images supporting an intuitive path through the diverse galleries of projects, instead of the more formal grids that we used in our previous iteration. These loops allow some projects to appear in different typologies – it’s very flexible. It is designed to work on a phone as much as on a desktop.
We also focussed on high-quality images – drawings, plans and especially photographs. We have always invested in great photography of our work – and this is now done by people who have also trained as landscape architects, meaning that they have an inherent understanding of the integrated design needed to support people, place and space. Our archive goes back fifteen years or more and has been a wonderful resource for the new website, as is our ever-increasing portfolio of lively drawings. So once the structure of the website had been set up, we were able to draw on this resource, the main issue being selection of few enough images!
It has been a two year long challenge but we are finally there – Erz are launching a new website that expresses the full gamut of work done by our brilliant landscape architect team. We are indebted to DaySix and thankful for their amazing patience, which has also involved supporting us through the population of the site and continues as we maintain it.