EPACenter
Client: EPACenter and John & Marcia Goldman Foundation
Services: Signage Design
Architect: wHY Architects
Construction Management: Mack5
EPACenter is a 24,000-sf new youth arts and music center in East Palo Alto, CA, home to a diverse and vibrant community. Through a collaboration with EPA's youth via a series of workshops, Atelier Cho Thompson, together with wHY Architects, engaged in creative brainstorming sessions to ensure the final design reflected the community's identity and aspirations. The signage design was conceived with sensitive consideration of the community's input alongside the architectural vision. The signage provides creative wayfinding in a complex and dynamic building and serves to reinforce the architecture.
The vision of EPACenter, a play on words of an earthquake's "epicenter," expresses the center's mission to become a seismic force of artistic activity and inspiration in this region. The signage design expresses this energizing mission through concentric circles, dynamic arrows that turn corners, and bent painted metal Welcome/Bienvenidos/Tali Tali Fiefia signs that hang above the Center's reception desk. The vibrancy of colors and form in the signage reflects the creativity of East Palo Alto's youth and its predominantly Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, and Latinx community.
Photos by Mike Sanchez
