Branding firm Wolff Olins has created a typeface for Paris gallery Lafayette Anticipations, based on the building's "mechanical" renovation by Dutch studio OMA.

The agency was asked to create a visual identity that would reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of the gallery, which opened on 10 March 2018, inside a 19th-century building that has undergone an extensive renovation by Rem Koolhaas' firm.
The revamped building acts as both an exhibition and performance space, but also also hosts workshops in its basement, providing invited artists with space and tools to create new artworks.

The art centre's steel and glass Exhibition Tower comprises four motorised platforms, which can move up and down independently to align with different floors ? allowing the space to be reconfigured in 49 different ways. Wolff Olins was keen to reflect this through its bespoke typeface, created in collaboration with foundry Colophon, and did so by cutting the sans-serif lettering into different parts.

By inconsistently cropping and misaligning letters, the studios aimed to convey movement in the type, as a nod to the building's "mechanical" design.
As artists would continually be at work in the gallery space, the designers also wanted to create a feeling of anticipation by concealing the letting in parts, rather than revealing things in full.

"As the artists make their pieces, so the building makes different spaces. Visitors wouldn't know what to expect next,&q...