I am very proud to announce that after 15 years we have designed a new website for Wowhaus. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how well the site we built in 1999 has held up over the years, hence the delay and hesitation: ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?’ Right?
Because we had actualized so little work as the artist team of Wowhaus when we designed the original site in the late 90’s, we arranged things chronologically in anticipation of the career arc we anticipated, scrollable like a ‘blog, but long before ‘blogs even existed. This became cumbersome after over 15 years of collated projects. Also, the platforms we used to design and maintain the website became obsolete, and our systems manager moved to South Africa.
Our new site is more like a collage, featuring projects more visually up front, all part of the same conceptual thrust regardless of their origin, location or timeframe. Projects are arranged visually, with no particular hierarchy, and are more randomly accessible. Closer inspection reveals the divergent details. We will continue to add content as our current projects are installed and documented.
While refining the text and going through our image archives for the new site, I realized that we never really take pause to reflect on the work we’ve accomplished as a whole. Seeing the completed website for the first time gave me a rare perspective of an outsider looking in, and I found a fresh perspective on what we actually do.
It occurred to me that Wowhaus projects are an extension of our domestic life- a glimpse of what the world might look like if a family decides to rebuild it as an extension of home, claiming public space for the kinds of use patterns that might normally be associated with home, with raising a family, building a community; recasting the world as an extension of home, as both a critique and a proposal.
Click here to see the new Wowhaus website.