Maple is a vast, granite clad structure that covers an entire city block on Tottenham Court Road. First designed in 1973 by Richard Seifert for (the now defunct) Maple&Co, its 70,000 sq ft of office space has been recently transformed by developer Lazari to refresh the building’s relationship with its city surroundings.

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We worked closely with architects Gibson Thornley to create a visual identity, wayfinding system and large-scale environmental graphics. Our concept stems from prominent ’T-shaped’ granite segments which slot together to make up the building’s cladding. By tracing these brutalist forms, we built a signature visual language and grid—faithful to Maple’s past yet flexible enough for its future. Led by a logotype of contrasting horizontal and vertical strokes, the visual identity slots architecturally into the space as large-scale pictograms, custom-drawn typeforms and diagrammatic directories. These elements are fabricated in anodised aluminium and gloss black pained MDF blocks, reinforcing the weight and scale of the surroundings. Our secondary typeface GT Cinetype Mono complements this in its visual fine-ness and heritage of being laser cut in curve-less brutalist block shapes.

Developer: Lazari Investments
Architect: Gibson Thornley
GT Cinetype Mono: Grilli Type
Photography: Thomas Adank, Ben Gibson, Studio S.P.