Archtober, the month-long festival celebrating the architecture and design of New York City, is organized each year by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The event has presented daily tours, lectures, films and exhibitions that highlight the ever-changing landscape of metropolitan architecture. Once again, Pentagram has designed the identity and exhibition for the festival, extending the graphic program they’ve developed for Archtober’s previous five editions.
This year is the sixth Archtober, and the 2016 identity is built around a mathematical diagram called a Voronoi tessellation, a honeycomb-like system of irregular polygons that in this instance has been generated from six points. (Mathematically speaking, “the diagram partitions a plane with n points into convex polygons so that each polygon contains exactly one generating point, and every point in a given polygon is closer to its generating point than to any other.”)
The tessellation surrounds the distinctive Archtober frame logo in applications such as print advertisements and street banners, and shifts, moves and rearranges itself in animations created for online promotion. The identity also appears on the updated Archtober website, where a responsive rollover transforms the partition.
The designers collaborated with the architecture firm SOFTlab on the design of the Archtober Lounge at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village. SOFTlab expanded the tessellation into a dimensional environment in the Center’s main exhibition space. Constructed of corrugated cardboard (held together by butterfly bandages), the installation inexpensively transformed the gallery into a unique architectural setting all its own. The exhibition also continues the tradition of presenting a calendar that highlights each day’s events. This year’s calendar is made of collectible cards that feature the Building of the Day.
