And Atelier’s graphic designs for Porto’s Gallery of Architecture is informed by the space

And Atelier’s recent work for The Gallery of Architecture, a new institution which shares the same home city as the studio in Porto, appears accomplished but is only the beginning of its working collaboration.

The Portuguese graphic design practice, founded by Joao Araújo and Rita Huet, applies a contemporary method of working to a brief. “Our work tries to accomplish a solid conceptual approach, through articulate solutions with a strong typographic component and respect for reading rhythms,” say the pair. When you dive into And Atelier’s portfolio over on its website, each project has a certain care to it. A type of care you often find with fresh studios, whose enthusiasm for the discipline lifts of the page, publication, website or identity.

Describing their projects as “beloved”, for The Gallery of Architecture in particular the pair were asked “to develop our own views and perspectives on the addressed issues so we set up a few guidelines that allow us to approach each exhibition in a bold yet consistent way,” they tell It’s Nice That.

And Atelier took this brief of communicating their views of the gallery quite literally, informing the grid system that would inform the outcome: “Inspired by the exhibition space — a small and peculiar squared area with a straight connection with the street and passersby — we determined the presence of this geometric shape in the centre of each poster, challenging every relationship and decision, the same way each person would have to carefully reflect upon it, when intervening in the exhibition space.”

As a result, each piece of work whether it be portrait or landscape is displayed like a window filled with warped shifting typography in a bold colour palette of blue and green hues. “With a limited production budget, we thought it would be interesting if each print would act both as a poster (on one side and when opened) and as room sheet (on the other side when closed) where visitors could find more information and keep it. At the same time, this allows for a printed publication archive to be built step by step.” The budget also informed the colour palette and texture of the prints, each printed using riso and in limited print runs.

The success of And Atelier’s design is due to their consideration of the ethos of the architecture gallery as a whole which “proposes to explore architecture as an exercise to think of the discipline itself and its limits,” says the institution. “From the intersection with other areas and including the approach to discipline by emerging practices, this is a space for exhibitions, thinking and debates, focused on the clash of ideas, art, architecture, city and territory,” and now with And Atelier’s input, graphic design too.