The Wapping Project
The Wapping Project
CampaignIdentityTypefaceWebsite
The Wapping Project was launched in 1993 by the theatre director Jules Wright (1948–2015) from the Women’s Playhouse Trust, a charity dedicated to furthering opportunities and the working climate for women in theatre. That year, Wright began to mount work in the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, one of London’s most beautiful, derelict buildings. From then onwards, it became known as The Wapping Project, a post-industrial space for both male and female contemporary artists to produce multi-disciplinary site-specific exhibitions and performances.
The original identity for The Wapping Project was created by Vince Frost, for whom Sonya worked. Frost Design designed wonderfully bold, yet etherial print for the events at the Power Station. The building was just as important as the exhibitions and performances. The old machinery, pressure pipes, hooks, valves and rusty chains were still very much present, yet the building was alive with a fresh start.
When we were asked to re-design the identity, we were thrilled to be connected once again with the project after so many years. We were inspired by the station, in which everything was built from an industrial, modular system such as bricks, tiles, chains or pipes. We loved the idea of an element that is machine-made, mechanical, progressive and rhythmical. We built the “W” logo as a reference to the slanted structures found in the iron roof trusses. François Rappo’s Theinhardt typeface echoed the industrial feel perfectly. We extended it by developing bespoke characters used as display typeface for headlines.
The identity is expressed in outputs including its website, where we animated the bespoke characters, but also in books, campaigns and exhibition materials. These modular elements echo the industrial nature of the power station and the potential it offered in terms of experimentation.
Jules left us too early at the age of 67, in June 2015. The Power Station is no longer the site of The Wapping Project, but the co-directors Marta Michalowska and Thomas Zanon-Larcher continue working with artists as a nomadic platform for the continuous development of ideas, thoughts and people.
