Casa Quetzal
A four-floor cultural centre bringing contemporary Guatemala to London.My mother's family is Guatemalan, I lived there as a child and I have gone back regularly since. Guatemala tends to be read through its economics before its culture, and that framing carries a certain lack of reverence with it. Its craft, food and landscape can sit alongside those of countries like France or Italy, and I wanted to design an institution that treats them that way from the outset. That meant building the identity out of things any Guatemalan would recognise, rather than the handful of images the country is usually reduced to.
Visitors move up through the building rather than around it, and each floor does a different job. The ground floor is arrival and immersion: a hallway of moving images, a market of fruit, textiles and toys, and a garden anchored by a ceiba tree. The first floor turns to craft, pairing an archive of jade and ceremonial textiles with a workshop where you weave and shape barro yourself.
The second floor is voices, a small theatre ringed by listening pillars carrying recorded stories from Guatemala today. The third is the table, a restaurant serving pepián and atol de elote, with a shop on the way out. Looking, making, listening, eating: the sequence moves from watching the culture to taking part in it.
The logotype uses letterforms of near-consistent width, so the lockup could be rebuilt vertically without breaking. Stacked as two columns, Casa and Quetzal allude to the blocks of Maya hieroglyphic writing, which held to regular proportions in a similar way. The Q is fully custom, a minimal quetzal whose tail becomes the stem, made to sit in the wordmark or stand alone as the icon. The A drops its crossbar so its peak reads as a volcano.
Each colour is named for the material it comes from: jade for the stone the Maya carved, tierra for sunbaked adobe, tiza for the pale ash left after coal burns clean, ceniza for volcanic ash. Each expands into a five-shade range, so the identity can sit quiet on a gallery wall or saturated on a street banner.
The horizontal and vertical lockups mean every application starts with a choice. A tall banner on a building takes the vertical stack, a postcard takes the horizontal one, and the mark fits the space instead of the space having to accommodate the mark.
The pieces themselves are held to the restraint of a museum rather than the brightness of a tourist board, which is the whole argument of the project carried into print. The archive poster catalogues a silver quetzal ring with an object ID, composition and wear notes, giving an everyday object the treatment a collection piece would get.