Leisure and Tourism
‘I am the walrus’: Anatomy’s charming new identity for the Horniman Museum
I struggle to think of a subculture I detest quite as viscerally and deeply as steampunks: not only is it aesthetically quite hideous, I just don’t really get it – it’s the past! But the future! But very dusty and everyone’s a creep! Inexplicably wearing goggles! It all smacks of a man in the corner of your front room at...
Perky Bros puts restrained Southern hospitality before shouty branding in its identity for Tennessee resort Southall
Branding parlance often deifies qualities like ‘boldness’ – being ‘brave’, ‘zigging when others zag’, ‘disruption,’ and so on and so forth. Some projects, however, demand and deserve the absolute opposite; the sign of a good designer, perhaps, is to intuitively know which one is which. This is one such project. Southall is resort set across 325 acres just outside Franklin,...
How & How takes a smart, bright collage-based approach to overhauling Bristol Dockyards
For those outside of Bristol, it’s all too easy to assume that the city is merely a place where Triphop and Dubstep were born; a Mecca for trustafarian types on a perennial ‘gap yahhh’ wearing those trousers that make people look as if they’ve had some sort of toilet issue; a place where the streets are paved with ketamine and...
OlssønBarbieri rewrites the rulebook on ‘formality’ in its melodrama-infused Theaterbaren identity
Oslo’s Nationaltheatret (simply translated to English as National Theatre) first opened its doors more than a century ago in 1899, and has since come to not only reflect, but actively shape cultural identity in Norway. Having staged everything from more traditional Norwegian dramas from the likes of Henrik Ibsen to experimental contemporary works, the building itself is also a marriage...
Off-kilter and elevated
St Paul’s Cathedral is undoubtedly one of the most iconic, recognisable landmarks of London’s skyline: its vast dome, all beautiful copper-tarnished turquoise, resplendent with dazzlingly golden pineapples (one of its architect Sir Christopher Wren’s favourite accoutrements, and back in the 17th century a distinct status symbol representing all that was bountiful and exotic). Until 1963, St Paul’s was the tallest...
Kunsthalle Basel by Porto Rocha
Basel is a fascinating place – beautiful but unassuming, relatively small but the undisputed capital of the contemporary art world. Not only is it the host of – as you’d guess from the name – Art Basel, the Art Fair that arguably forms the pinnacle of the global art market calendar, but it also has one of the highest densities...
The Huntington by Base Design
There’s a particular kind of challenge that crops up again and again in cultural branding – not obscurity exactly, but partial recognition. The sort where an institution is famous for one thing, quietly exceptional at several others, and yet rarely understood as a coherent whole. The Huntington, a century-old cultural and research institution in Southern California, sits squarely in that...
Hotel Park Ave NYC by Colt
Located on the corner of Park Avenue South and East 30th Street in Manhattan’s Midtown, Hotel Park Ave is the artist formerly known as the Mondrian Park Avenue. Its change in name is thanks to its change in owner: international hospitality company Lore Group announced its acquisition of the site and mooted its subsequent rebrand late last year, and to...
Post Post Hotel by Studio Bruch
If you’re reading BP&O, you’re more likely than most to be the type who knows their counters from their stems; their terminals from their tittles, and so on. In short, a TypeNerd – categorically one of the best kinds of nerd. And what do nerds like? Hyper specific ‘injokes’ that aren’t exactly striving to be funny, perhaps you might call...
Klangwelt Toggenburg by Studio Marcus Kraft
Klangwelt Toggenburg (which translates as ‘sound world Toggenburg’) is a cultural organisation that manages to marry a devotion to the experience and exploration of (you guessed it) sound, with breathtakingly gorgeous (as far as I can tell from Google Images, anyway) mountainous natural landscapes of the Swiss Alps, and some serious architectural chops to boot. Klangwelt Toggenburg began life more...
ROM by Leo Burnett
Okay, let’s get it out of the way… yes, there are elements of Pentagram’s 2018 Library of Congress in Leo Burnett’s work for the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). In both projects, type is a frame for images of archive material. Is it BP&O’s responsibility to acknowledge similarities in all the work we publish, tracking a typology back to the start...
Saaristo by Bond
‘Saaristo’ is the generic term for ‘archipelago’ in Finnish, but – to the outside world – it’s sufficiently distinctive to refer to the entire region in Western Finland, which now makes up a new tourism brand. This brand intends to generate more interest in (and visitors to) the world’s largest archipelago: a collection of 40,000 islands. This scale makes it...