Clients: Laurie Chetwood
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Laurie Chetwood is a remarkable architect based in London, who is the chairman of Chetwoods Architects – one of the top twenty architects in the country. Laurie is best known for his redesigns of Underground and bus stations, business parks and branches of Sainsbury’s, and designing new and inventive renewable energy sculptures. His extraordinary renewable energy sculptures include the eye-catching ‘Butterfly House’ – a unique, one-off family home with a design that is inspired by the lifecycle of the butterfly, which in 2004 was shortlisted for the Manser Medal and the RFAC’s ‘Building of the Year’, and Kevin McCloud (Channel 4) describes as “An astonishing experiment in residential design.”
Laurie’s approach to design is non-formulaic – ‘taking precedent largely from nature and involving psychological profiling as an extensive part of the brief-making process’ (www.chetwoods.com). The website Sound in Theory developed to showcase Laurie’s personal projects reflects this philosophy.
Sound in Theory was subcontracted to develop Laurie’s website by Squint/Opera – a unique film and media production studio that operate within the film industry and architectural practice. We had previously worked with Squint/Opera to create the Renaissance Leeds website (www.leedsrisingcity.org) – a site that successfully brought Squint/Opera’s work for the Renaissance Leeds project to the web. We were thrilled to work closely with Squint/Opera once again, to develop the impressive design and visuals they had created for Laurie into a stylish, interactive full-flash website.
Squint/Opera’s vision for Lauriechetwood.com was innovative, unconventional and inspired by nature, and therefore beautifully reflected Laurie’s architecture. A spring meadow teeming with a variety of picturesque wildlife and eccentric constructions, designed by Squint/Opera, forms the basis of the site. We ensured this spring meadow is an interactive as possible by peppering the scene with a variety of interactive animated icons, which, when clicked on, reveal further information about Laurie’s architecture.
Squint/Opera designed each of the animated icons that lead into the different project sections; Sound in Theory brought each of them to life. These include a swan that flies you to information about Laurie’s Wind Dam creation in Lake Lagoda, Russia; a butterfly that flutters you to information about the Butterfly House; and a white flower that leads to information about Laurie’s ‘Andes House’ (a house styled like an alpine flower). Inside each section, information and beautiful drawings provide more information about each project, as well as, in some cases, flash videos that Sound in Theory helped to edit, which take you to stroll right through and around Laurie’s architecture.
Responsibilities for Laurie Chetwood