This is, then, a building of the future, with a whiff of science fiction about it … on the glamorous end. As such, it is endowed with a certain mystery. Says Flat art director Petter Ringbom, “Based on the identity design by Pentagram, we created a site that reflects the luminous quality of an architecture based on air, light and space.” The idea was to develop a site at once experiential and informative. “Through color, transparency, movement and sound,” says Ringbom, “the goal was to capture the essence of the archi­tecture.” The building’s architecture and Pentagram’s identity design, then, provided the aesthetics for the site design.

Targeting realtors and home buyers in New York at a time when new buildings are springing up like weeds across the city, sites like these have their work cut out for them … especially since the website often goes up well before a building even exists. For many potential buyers, the web provides their first view of a building, and these prospective occupants expect to see very precise architectural renderings of the exterior, interior and floor plans, as well as to learn about the architect and the neighbor­hood. Many websites in this category are predictable and formulaic, seemingly based more on what other sites are doing than on the building they describe.

“We wanted to avoid that,” says Ringbom. “And because of Asymptote’s exceptional architecture, we had a lot to work with.”

Built primarily with Photoshop, Flash and PHP, the site’s animated color-gradient backgrounds occupy the entire browser window, creating a continuous changing-color effect, which—along with an atmospheric soundscape—suggests the currents of weather, underwater depths, wind, silence, twilight, dawn—in essence, the subtle movements of the Earth.

“I like that you can navigate the pages in multiple ways,” says Ringbom. “You can flip through the transparent pages like a book or go directly to a page in the bottom nav.” The site has the feel of a virtual-world game, of being allowed to materialize at will inside the building—in different rooms, all of which are endowed with the promise of something about to happen. This, it would seem, is what the audience has come for. Dana Rouse