Notes

How the night is made, what is real and what is a model.

The streets are real

The map is drawn from OpenStreetMap: 6,909 roads, the river Bîc and the routes of the trolleybus network, downloaded through the Overpass API and packed into a 136 KB binary of metres east and south of the centre. Every line on the page is a street that exists.

The night is a model

Nobody counts the cars on Chișinău's streets at three in the morning, so the traffic is a model. Cars are placed on the real road graph, more on boulevards than on side streets, and drive at city speeds, turning at real junctions. How many are out follows one curve through the night: the evening rush thins after ten, bottoms out between three and four, and comes back with the first shifts.

The block's 144 windows follow a second curve, the share of flats with a light on. Each flat has two random ranks, one for when it goes to bed and one for when it gets up, so the lights go out one by one instead of all at once, and the people who stay up longest are not the same as the ones who get up first. The numbers on the page come from the same model as the drawing, so they always agree with it.

One clock

Everything that carries the idea is driven by one number, the hour. Each chapter of the page says which hour it stands for, and the hour at any scroll position is read off those marks. The map's camera, the amount of traffic, the dawn colour, the corner clock and the windows of the block all read that number and nothing else.

How it is drawn

The map is one WebGL2 canvas: every street segment is an instanced quad with a width set in screen pixels, cars leave short streaks behind them (white one way, red the other, like a long exposure), and a small bloom pass makes the light glow.
The block is an isometric SVG built with the anatomy kit: 343 solids, painted back to front, with its windows, balconies, gas pipe and roof machinery at 10 cm a unit.
Scroll runs on Lenis, motion on GSAP, both on one ticker. The site is static, built with Astro.
Type is Archivo, condensed for the display like the letters on top of Soviet-era blocks, and IBM Plex Mono for the clock and the counts.

Without motion

With reduced motion turned on, or without WebGL, the page shows a still of the map at ten in the evening, and the block shows its windows for the hour you are at, without fading.