Conservation practice archive
Abha Narain Lambah Associates
I designed and built a public archive for one of India’s leading conservation practices, connecting its projects, places, awards, publications, and people.
- Period
- Practice website and digital archive
- Role
- Information architecture · interaction design · full-stack build
- Field
- Information architecture · editorial website · spatial archive
Built a searchable public archive for decades of conservation projects, awards, publications, and people.
The design problem was larger than presenting beautiful buildings. The practice holds a dense record spanning archaeological sites, museums, forts, civic landmarks, gardens, religious sites, adaptive reuse, and World Heritage work. The website needed to preserve the specificity of each project while revealing the larger geography and intellectual continuity of the practice.
How it works
An archive becomes useful when it supports more than one route through memory.
Projects are the primary records, but maps, types, awards, publications, people, and related work create alternate entrances. The website behaves as a public research surface rather than a chronological brochure.
- 01Archive
Project records gather location, period, type, narrative, status, and image sequences.
- 02Classify
Typologies and themes let readers traverse the work by conservation question, not only by date.
- 03Locate
A spatial interface reveals the geographic breadth and regional relationships of the practice.
- 04Narrate
Individual pages combine context, intervention, drawings, photography, and related records.
- 05Connect
Awards, publications, and team histories make institutional continuity visible around the projects.
- 06Publish
Responsive media, metadata, and discoverable routes turn the internal archive into a public resource.
The condition
A major practice could not be reduced to a project grid.
The archive includes work at sites such as Ajanta, Bodh Gaya, Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex, Amer, Shivneri, Santiniketan, Mumbai’s Victorian and Art Deco ensembles, Sarnath, Mughal Gardens, and Mandu. Each record belongs to a site, but also to a typology, a geography, a conservation method, and a continuing institutional argument.
A conventional portfolio would force all of that into identical cards. The information architecture instead treats the collection as a body of knowledge with multiple valid ways to enter and follow it.
The spatial index
Geography became a way of reading the institution.
The map is not decorative contact-page furniture. It is an alternate index into the work, connecting dispersed projects through place and allowing the breadth of the practice to become visible at once.
That spatial view is paired with project types and editorial routes so a visitor can move between the territorial scale of the archive and the precise story of a single intervention.
The project record
Photography and documentation were sequenced as evidence.
Conservation projects require context: what existed, why it mattered, what changed, and how the intervention relates to the original fabric. Project pages were built to carry long image sequences and explanatory material without turning the work into a slideshow detached from its meaning.
Related projects, publications, awards, and practice information keep the reader within the institutional archive rather than returning them to a generic home screen after every record.
The build
The technical system serves a very large visual archive.
The site uses the Next.js App Router with data-driven project records, image galleries, D3 for spatial views, and carefully controlled motion. Mantine and Tailwind support interface structure while the typography and image rhythm carry the practice’s editorial voice.
The build separates content structure from presentation so the archive can continue to grow without losing the relationships that make it intelligible.
What I learned
Key lessons from the project.
Archives need alternate doors
Chronology, geography, type, publication, and people reveal different truths about the same body of work.
Context belongs beside beauty
Conservation imagery becomes meaningful when the record explains what the viewer is looking at.
The institution is the interface
Navigation should express how the practice thinks, not how a template categorises content.
Design for accumulation
A serious archive must become richer—not more chaotic—as new records arrive.