A building that assembles itself as you scroll, for a factory that has not opened yet

Precast is a different way to build, and the person being sold to is usually a developer or an EPC contractor who has done it the other way for twenty years. The ordinary construction-company website — a hero shot of a finished tower, a grid of past projects, a photograph of the plant — was not available here. There was no completed project, and the factory was still being commissioned.

The thing being sold is also hard to picture. "Factory-cast components erected by crane" means very little until you have watched a floor close in a day. On a conventional site every floor waits for the one below to be formed, poured and cured; with precast the casting runs in parallel with the groundwork. That is the entire commercial argument, and it is a sequence rather than a photograph — which is exactly why a page of paragraphs about it does not land.

We made the sequence the spine of the page. The centrepiece is a scroll-pinned WebGL build: a three-storey frame that assembles in nine phases as you scroll — pile caps and plinth grid, columns, prestressed beams, hollow-core planks, wall panels, stairs, the repeated upper floors, roof and parapet, then the closed envelope. The camera holds at each phase while a panel names the element and the spec it would carry: 420 × 420 mm RCC columns in C60, 200 mm hollow-core planks, beams spanning to 12 m at L/480.

Then we gave the reader a way out of it. A long pinned sequence is a trap if the visitor already knows what precast is, so there is a Skip control throughout and a phase rail down the right-hand side that works as both a progress indicator and a jump target. Scrolling runs through Lenis so the pinned section tracks the wheel smoothly instead of snapping between phases.

The speed claim gets a number and shows its working. A programme comparison puts a 17-week precast schedule against 30 weeks cast in situ for the same illustrative frame, drawn as two Gantt bars rather than asserted as a percentage — and the caption underneath says it is illustrative and that real durations depend on design, site and logistics. A 40% figure with nothing behind it is the kind of number an engineer discounts on sight.

After the argument comes the catalogue, which is what an engineer actually arrived for: nine component families, six structural and three architectural, each carrying its own identifier, plus the industries the components suit and a plain statement of where the facility currently stands.

The site answers the two questions a precast supplier is actually asked — what do you make, and how much faster does it go up — without a single photograph of a finished building, because there is not one yet. The assembly sequence carries the explanation that photographs would normally do, and the component catalogue carries the detail an engineer checks before making contact.

It has not launched. The build was finished and handed over; the client then paused before going live, because the budget went into the plant and the facility is still in commissioning. What is linked here is that handed-over build, running on our own infrastructure as a demo rather than at Stratoform’s own domain. We would rather show the work and say plainly where it stands than leave it out of the list.