The Berlin Bran­den­burg Air­port is one of the largest and most com­plex trans­port in­fra­struc­ture pro­jects in Ger­many. The build­ing was de­signed by the renowned ar­chi­tects gmp and JSK In­ter­na­tional. Moni­teurs was al­ready ac­tively in­volved in the pro­ject at the com­pe­ti­tion phase for the com­mu­ni­ca­tions de­sign, and by de­grees was com­mis­sioned to de­sign the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem for the air­port in­clud­ing its sur­round­ings. A key de­sign fea­ture is the colour red, un­usual for air­ports. This gives clear sig­nals for ori­en­ta­tion, and also har­monises with the ar­chi­tec­ture, with its warm tones of wood and nat­ural stone. At the same time, it is mod­elled on the ap­pear­ance of its home states of Berlin and Bran­den­burg. In many places, the signs are di­rectly em­bed­ded into the ar­chi­tec­tural pan­els – some flow around the cor­ner, and this con­cept is wo­ven into the prod­uct de­sign of the signs out­side the build­ing.

Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich taught as guest pro­fes­sors in China at the CDK (the Chi­nese Ger­man Art Acad­emy in Hangzhou) – a co­op­er­a­tion pro­ject be­tween the UdK Berlin (Berlin Uni­ver­sity of the Arts) and the CAA (Chi­nese Art Acad­emy), their work con­cerned the sub­ject of air­ports and new cre­ative ap­proaches to vastly dif­fer­ent fields of de­sign. Their lec­tures in­cluded all com­mu­ni­ca­tion me­dia em­ployed at an air­port, in­fo­graph­ics, ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems, the cor­po­rate de­sign of an air­port, the cor­po­rate de­sign of an air­line, dig­i­tal me­dia such as apps, in­fo­graph­ics on the air­field and the graph­i­cal use of space.

Cre­ative Morn­ings is a monthly morn­ing lec­ture se­ries. Be­gun in New York, it is now held in var­i­ous places around the world. By cre­atives, for cre­atives or in­ter­ested in­di­vid­u­als. In Berlin, Cre­ative Morn­ings is or­gan­ised by Jür­gen Siebert from Fontshop. In Jan­u­ary 2012, Moni­teurs was in­vited to talk about the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem they de­signed for the new Berlin Bran­den­burg Air­port. The group, lim­ited to 25 peo­ple, had the plea­sure of be­ing per­son­ally guided through the new air­port build­ing. The talk took place at the gate.