Grace
Grace is an international studio of architecture, urbanism, design and research based in Milan, founded by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, both formerly at OMA. Much of its work sits on the Soviet modernist inheritance of Central Asia: an index of Tashkent's modernist buildings, a restoration centre inside one of them, the Uzbek pavilion in Venice.
The site was made with POMO, who led creative direction and the identity. We designed the interface, and part of the front end was built later.
The contact page, over a rotating scan of a building.
The identity is built on a typeface drawn for the studio, with a Soviet reference nobody has to explain: Grace works on that architecture, and one of its founders was formed in it. What would be a borrowed style elsewhere is here the subject matter.
The site follows the same register. Structure left visible, interface reduced to type and rules, pages that read as documents rather than as presentations. The architecture is brutalist by conviction and the website behaves accordingly.
The works index, with the images surfacing behind the list.
A practice like this publishes in fragments: research, exhibitions, competitions, buildings, texts that belong to none of those categories. The interface treats them as one archive with a single grammar, so a photograph of a facade in Tashkent and a research note sit in the same system without either being dressed up.
Credits
Client: Grace
Creative direction and identity: POMO
Scope: UI design, creative coding
Development: MH srl, Pyet.ro