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.

Moni­teurs not only de­signed the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem in­side, but also out­side the build­ing – from the signs for foot pas­sen­gers and cy­clists to the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem for the car parks. The con­sis­tent ap­pli­ca­tion of a sin­gle graphic con­cept cre­ates a uni­form ap­pear­ance for the en­tire air­port site. The pic­togram fam­ily icons were ex­panded to in­clude site-spe­cific lo­ca­tions such as the vis­i­tor cen­tre and the Air­port City.

Lars Harm­sen: Can you tell us a few things about your fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that an ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem has an iden­tity, a char­ac­ter, and can­not be to­tally neu­tral?

Moni­teurs: How­ever an ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem is de­signed, it car­ries with it an iden­tity. To­day you have an op­por­tu­nity to shape it con­sciously – and you have to! It’s not like in the 70’s: then, all the signs were just painted yel­low. These days, it’s pos­si­ble to dif­fer­en­ti­ate much more and the air­ports have to, be­cause they’re all in com­pe­ti­tion with each other; they have to dis­tin­guish them­selves in or­der to bat­tle for the air­lines and the pas­sen­gers.