Building a digital archive

The activities of the Metalab(at)Harvard & FU Berlin are manifold. Projects and events with the most diverse results, in different time formats, in collaborations and with changing members are to be documented and archived on the website. The design of the website should have a strong recognition value, but not overshadow the visuality of the content. In addition, the design must be able to accommodate different content and formal projects and events.

The contents of the website are strongly linked to each other. Events take place within projects, members are part of projects, events belong thematically in a series. Likewise, active and former members, supporters and collaborators should be named and referenced on the page. The two locations of the Lab with two time zones also bring requirements for design and functionality.

From the Metalab’s side, the page and all content should be easy to edit. We therefore decided to use Strapi to manage the content and links. In order to create the large number of pages (~300 subpages) in a performant way, we decided to use Hugo. Interactivity is partially added by Svelte. Functionally, the site has many features like automatically generated calendar events, semantic content tagging and support for OpenGraph, JSON-LD and microformats.