Arsenaal is a former train repair complex in Ghent, built at the end of the nineteenth century by the national railway company and left behind in 2019. In the years that followed, the site was taken over informally by street artists and slowly turned into one of the city’s underground destinations. In 2022 it was decided that parts of the complex could be reopened as a new cultural venue for the city, and a first month of festivities was organised in September of that year. Studio Studio designed the identity for this opening programme.
The identity is built on the industrial metal rooftop structures of the Arsenaal site itself. A small set of parameters, repeated and varied, generates the entire visual language: a system of background lines that echoes the rhythm of the original architecture, paired with the typeface Haüser, whose construction picks up the same logic. The text is set in justified blocks across the lined background, so that each block of typography reads simultaneously as language and as another layer in the pattern, anchored to the margins of the page in the same way the metal beams are anchored to the perimeter of the building.
