/ Case study
SCDA Architects
We built SCDA Architects a Webflow site on 11 CMS collections, so its projects, news and publications live in one system.
Fri3nds project record (Webflow workspace copy), 2024
Who SCDA Architects is and why it needed a new website
SCDA is a Singapore practice led by its principal, Soo K. Chan, that works across architecture, interiors, landscape, lighting and products, with offices in Singapore, Shanghai, Manila and New York City. Its work spans homes, hotels, institutions and towers in cities around the world. SCDA came to us through Polyculture, the design studio led by Ryan Chan, who we met through a friend at The Futur. Polyculture owned the design, with Karolina Peciu Stonke drawing every page in Figma. Our job was to build it in Webflow so SCDA could run it.
The challenge: every project, every discipline, every region
An architecture site lives or dies on its project archive. SCDA needed every project to be findable by discipline, by category and by city, and each one needed room for large photography, a description and its year. The firm also publishes news, books and open positions, and it wanted to show the global reach of its work on a world map that could take new project pins over time. The design kept evolving while SCDA's team reviewed it, so we planned the build around a structure that would hold whatever the final pages asked for.
How we built SCDA's website in Webflow
The site runs on the CMS that everything else reads from: projects, disciplines, categories, cities and regions, countries, project assets, news, publications, awards, team and open positions. That is eleven collections, each one a place SCDA's team can edit without touching the design. The architecture, interiors and landscape pages filter that same project archive by category and region, and each project gets its own page with a full-width gallery. Cities and regions carry latitude and longitude fields, so locations live in the CMS alongside the projects.
- 11 CMS collections behind every page of the site
How we handed SCDA the keys
Polyculture's design called for quiet pages and big images, so we built the templates to get out of the way of the photography, on desktop and on phones. Victoria Lee from SCDA's graphics team was our content contact, and the review ran through Polyculture and SCDA together. The result was a site where adding a project, a news story or a publication is a CMS entry, not a design job.
What SCDA's website does today
The site we built in Webflow now runs on scdaarchitects.com. SCDA's projects sit on one archive that feeds the architecture, interiors and landscape pages, and the news and publications sections keep growing with the firm, including its recent exhibitions marking thirty years of practice. The design is Polyculture's. The structure underneath, the eleven collections that let SCDA's team keep the site current on their own, is ours.
Credits
Client: SCDA Architects. Joshua Cheam (Finance Director), Victoria Lee (Graphics)
Design: Polyculture. Ryan Chan (Managing Director), Karolina Peciu Stonke (designer)
Webflow development and CMS: the Fri3nds team. Account by Marcelo Russo and Esteban Muñiz; project management by Camila Ardila
Services: Webflow development, CMS architecture, responsive build
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