image · 2023
Shelter
Spaces that remember you.
Campaign art direction for a boutique architecture practice whose work sits between social housing and sculptural ambition.
Architecture for everyone
The image strategy
Rather than commission new photography, we embedded with the practice for three months and photographed spaces in the moments that mattered: a homework club using the Peckham centre on a Wednesday afternoon, a family moving into Lyon. Architecture photography usually waits for the building to be empty. We waited for it to be full.
Campaign system
The campaign ran across outdoor, print, and a site-specific installation during the Venice Architecture Biennale. The typographic system used a compressed grotesque overlaid on the images at scale — the text becoming part of the space, not a caption for it. Each execution used a single photograph taken at the moment someone understood the building was theirs.
Recognition
The campaign won a D&AD Yellow Pencil for Art Direction and was featured in It's Nice That's Year in Review. More importantly, enquiries to Shelter from housing associations and community groups tripled in the six months following the Biennale. That was the metric that mattered.