Design Challenge and Design Ideas

Close Encounter: Meetings with Remarkable Buildings grew out of the Venice Mentoring Initiative as a special project of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, Curators of Freespace, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice.

The aim of the initiative was to enable sixteen Irish architects to develop skills in presenting and communicating their work to a public audience in Venice. The exhibition tour (of The Glucksman in Cork and VISUAL in Carlow) gave Irish audiences an opportunity to engage with this unique exhibition.

How the brief was fulfilled

Taking a literal cue from the exhibition title, we referenced the scale and density/proximity of the built environment and the viewers’ experience of the exhibition. The bold, tightly-spaced, condensed typeface on the cover is a visual/literal pun (on the title) but also suggests the skyward reach of architectural forms.

The large-format interior pages (approx. A3 tabloid) feature a bold and rigorous ’oversized’ text-setting with overprinted architectural illustrations in fluorescent ink.

The cover and interior pages are all loose (unbound) – this allowed us to produce two different covers for the Glucksman (Red and Silver inks) and VISUAL (Blue and Silver inks) legs of the exhibition tour.