stoa: a concept site for an architecture practice in Moscow and Dubai

stoa is a fictional architecture practice with studios in Moscow and Dubai, working on buildings, public space and interiors. VITON¹³ built its website as a concept, to show how we approach an editorial portfolio for a design practice: a site where the projects carry the page and the text stays quiet.

The name is lowercase by design. A stoa was a covered colonnade in an ancient Greek city, a public room without walls, and the site keeps the same restraint: black and white, lowercase English typography, buttons in square brackets. The motion had to feel slow and weighty without getting in the way of any project, story or open role.

Ten pages: home, projects, a project page, studio, journal, an article page, careers, contact, privacy and a 404. The content is fictional but complete: 10 projects, 5 journal stories, 6 open roles and 2 studios on a dark map.

The home page opens with a counting loader and a video hero, then moves through “we” values that light up on scroll, services, the practice’s story with counters, featured projects with a floating image, awards as [ + ] accordions and a draggable journal slider. The projects page filters by discipline and switches between a staggered grid and a list with a cursor preview. Each project page has metadata, a lede, a parallax image, a draggable gallery and a link to the next project. The journal filters by category, careers are accordions with an application form, and contact has a dark map, both addresses and an enquiry form.

A typical path runs from Projects to a project and on to a journal article. Text is split into measured lines and revealed line by line; images unmask from the bottom and settle from a zoom; the hero scales down and dims as the visitor leaves it. Every internal link closes the page with a pale panel that counts to 100, the full-screen menu unrolls from the top with a photo for each item, and a custom cursor shows [ view project ] and [ read ] labels.

The site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step. The header, footer and overlays are rendered from one shared script, so every page stays identical. Motion runs on GSAP with ScrollTrigger and Lenis smooth scrolling; the map is Leaflet. The forms are demonstrations: demo state stays in the browser’s localStorage and nothing is sent anywhere. Photos from Unsplash and video from Pexels are licensed stock, loaded by direct CDN links.

The concept exists as 10 finished pages in English. On 22 September 2026 VITON¹³ checked 9 of them rendered in Chrome, leaving out the 404: all 9 have unique titles and a declared language, the layout holds at 390 px without sideways scroll, 100% of images have alt text and no internal link is broken.

Lighthouse measured the home page. On mobile: performance 88, accessibility 95, best practices 77 and SEO 100, with LCP 2.9 s, CLS 0.008 and TBT 0 ms. On desktop: performance 99, LCP 0.9 s and CLS 0.003. On mobile the home page weighs 13.4 MB across 21 requests, because of the full-HD hero video.

stoa is a concept, not a commissioned project. The practice, its people, projects, awards and addresses are fictional; the photos and video are licensed stock photography and video from Unsplash and Pexels. The site has no domain, no visitors, no search traffic and no enquiries, so this case says nothing about rankings, leads or how an architecture practice’s clients would use it.

The SEO score of 100 in Lighthouse covers basics only. Canonical URLs, Open Graph, JSON-LD, sitemap.xml and robots.txt are not in place yet, 8 of 9 titles fall outside 30–65 characters, and the Lighthouse figures are lab measurements of one page on one day, not data from real visitors.