BVNBVN100 Campaign & Micro-site

In 2026, BVN marked one hundred years of architectural practice. Founded by Arthur Bligh in Toowoomba in 1926, the practice has evolved across generations, partnerships and cities through the work of many hands.

The occasion offered a way to bring that collective history into public view through the projects, drawings, conversations, experiments and personal artefacts that have shaped the practice. After six years of shaping BVN’s brand and website together, we set out to create an experience that could connect these fragments, reveal relationships between them and remain active beyond the centenary.

Architectural histories are often told as chronicles of landmark buildings and singular authors. BVN’s archive tells a more complex story of reinvention, shaped by generations of people, changing partnerships and ideas carried from one project to the next. Bringing together work from different eras and formats meant finding a way to make those relationships visible.

A personal recollection or an overlooked object could offer as much insight into the culture of the practice as a celebrated building. The challenge was to give this varied material a shared form, making it accessible to people with very different relationships to BVN while leaving room for the history to keep accumulating.

We approached BVN100 as an open-world environment: part archive, part game board.

At its centre is a growing collection of 3D models, translating projects, objects and memories into a common visual language across an open isometric landscape. The models operate at an intentionally elastic scale. A skyscraper sits beside a gavel, a bottle or a stack of plans, giving recognised works and incidental traces of the practice equal standing. Where a story has no obvious physical counterpart, a symbolic stand-in gives it form.

This approach makes each model both a representation and a way into the archive. Visitors move through the landscape, selecting objects to uncover photographs, drawings, films and conversations. Related stories connect one discovery to another, allowing a picture of the practice to emerge through the visitor’s own path. 

Alongside this freedom to explore, a continuous timeline traces BVN from 1926 onwards. The two modes offer different ways of understanding the same history: through relationships or through sequence. A progress tracker records what visitors have uncovered, adding a subtle layer of game logic without prescribing a route.

The visual system distils BVN’s identity into a minimal kit of parts, giving the interface a consistent structure without sanding away the archive’s quirks. A black-and-white framework overlays the modelled landscape beneath, with bursts of colour and sound surfacing through each interaction.

Designed to outlive the centenary, BVN100 continues to grow as new material enters the landscape, while events and workshops extend the project beyond the screen. Rather than closing the record on a century of practice, the platform marks the beginning of BVN’s next hundred years.