A town historical commission came to us with an archive problem. Years of preservation research, paint analyses, structural surveys, archaeology reports, lived on a platform that was being retired. The records needed a new home, and the town deserved better than a list of PDF links.
Because the town itself is the star: centuries-old houses, a storied waterfront, landmarks people travel to see. So we built the archive around a simple idea. Let visitors fly.
The atlas
The heart of the build is a 3D atlas. Photorealistic 3D tiles of the actual town stream into the browser, and visitors glide over real rooftops and real streets. Select a landmark and the camera flies to it, banking down to a low cinematic angle. Close the record and the camera pulls back out to the opening shot over the water.
The record cards are the detail we are proudest of. When the camera lands on a site, its card does not just appear. The site's geographic coordinate is projected to on-screen pixels, and the card scales out of that exact point, as if it were emerging from the building itself. Click a map pin and the card grows from the pin. Close it and it shrinks back the same way before the camera flies home.
Each landmark owns an identity color, a jewel tone that follows it everywhere: its floating label in the 3D scene, its map pin, its list numeral, its category badges, even the tint of its card shadow. A place reads with the same color wherever you meet it.
The whole thing is built as an app shell rather than a pile of pages: a gradient side rail on desktop, a bottom tab bar on the phone, and five views, welcome, atlas, library, tours, about, that switch in place. The typography pairs a clean geometric face with serif italics for the editorial accents, an archive that reads like a well-set book but behaves like software.
Restraint in the engine room
Streaming a photorealistic town into a browser is expensive, so most of the engineering is about what we refused to spend:
- The 3D scene renders at one times device pixels, trading invisible sharpness for real frame rate
- The camera is penned to the town's bounds, which also means far fewer tiles to stream
- The tile layer is created once and left alone, so searching and selecting never rebuild the 3D scene
- Once opened, the atlas stays mounted in the background, so leaving and returning never re-streams the town
- The atlas pre-loads quietly behind the intro screen, so by the first visit to the map the tiles are already there
Reduced motion is honored in five separate systems. The camera flights become instant cuts, the record cards fade instead of scaling, entrance animations switch off, and the keyboard focus guide stops gliding. Spectacle is an optional layer here, never a toll.
The fallback nobody will notice
Real 3D depends on an API key and a commercial tile service, and we refused to let a public archive's survival depend on either. If the 3D key is absent, the atlas quietly becomes a 2D map, restyled to a warm parchment finish with medallion pins in each site's identity color. If no backend is configured, the archive serves its built-in seed data. The whole platform runs with zero keys and zero backend, complete and usable.
That is not an edge case we grudgingly handled. It is a design position. Public history infrastructure should degrade toward working, and the 2D map had to be good enough that nobody who saw it would feel shortchanged.
The archive underneath the spectacle
Under the atlas sits the real work: 18 preservation documents, about 55 MB, rescued off the retiring platform and self-hosted so they can never vanish with someone else's CDN. Paint microscopy analyses. Structural surveys. Ground-penetrating-radar archaeology reports. Engineering drawings. A thesis.
Each record keeps its scholarly metadata: author, credentials, affiliation, date, category. Search runs across titles, authors, affiliations, categories, and the parent sites themselves, and it is one keystroke away from anywhere: press the slash key and type. Filters are colored chips with a live result count, and a record that is not yet available says so honestly instead of hiding behind a dead link.
The accessibility bar did not drop because the subject is old. The archive ships our full in-house accessibility suite, seven one-click profiles over 23 individual adjustments, built as first-party code rather than rented as an overlay subscription.
Why we build things like this
Small historic towns rarely get this grade of software. Budgets are thin, vendors default to brochureware, and the research ends up scattered across whatever platform held it last. That is exactly why we wanted this one.
History that has survived three centuries deserves infrastructure that will not be undone by one canceled subscription. Fly over the town when the 3D is there. Read the map when it is not. Either way, the record survives.
