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A fictional architecture studio whose method is the sun. I wrote the practice, designed the identity and built the site in Webflow, with a scroll-driven 3D hero and a drawing set that takes the place of photography.
Visit the live concept site ↗The brief
Architecture studios usually sell themselves with renders and photographs. GNOMON was a test of the opposite: a studio that shows its buildings only as drawings, and explains its method before its portfolio.
The brief I set: a seven-person practice between Mexico City and Rome, small public buildings, houses and baths, every project starting from a sun study. The site had to feel like a drawing set, quiet and exact, and still be easy to use.
Process
I started with words: the line “We design the shadow first.” and three steps, sun study, section, material. That became the structure of the Practice page and the order of every project page.
The identity is two colours, concrete and shadow, and one typeface, Archivo, used from condensed labels to a heavy headline. The UI borrows from drawing conventions: hairline rules, grid axes, figure numbers.
On the home page the axonometric drawing turns into a 3D model as you scroll, moving through the form, the corridor and the court. Projects and journal entries live in the Webflow CMS, with SEO and plain-text pages for AI search.
After Tadao Ando
The drawings follow the way Tadao Ando draws by hand: few lines, heavy hatching on concrete, long shadows and figures for scale.
I’m not a trained architectural draughtsman, so I made the technical drawings with AI and code. I set the references, the line weights, the hatching and the composition, built the drawings in code with Claude Code, and reworked every sheet until it fitted the brand. The plans, sections and sketches of the Museo de la Ladera, Casa Gnomon and Ember Bathhouse came out of that process, under my art direction.
Outcome
A complete concept site: home, projects, project pages, practice, journal and contact, with a CMS behind it. It is also the fictional architect of my other two concept sites, Ember Bathhouse and Skerry House.
Images
The artwork
