HOPE Outdoor Gallery
Austin's beloved graffiti park, reborn on nine acres in East Austin, where the buildings themselves spell HOPE for every plane landing over the city. We built the landmark: the letterforms, the brand sculpture, the signage and wayfinding, the retail and the café.
Andi Scull
Founder, HOPE Outdoor Gallery
When HOPE Outdoor Gallery moved from its legendary Baylor Street hill to a purpose-built, nine-acre campus on Dalton Lane in East Austin, we didn't build a sign. We built a landmark you can see from the sky.
HOPE Outdoor Gallery is one of Austin's most photographed places: a free, community graffiti and street-art park that founder Andi Scull calls "a visual open mic," run on a single rule: open walls, open to all. It began in 2006 as a collaboration with Shepard Fairey, spent the better part of a decade drawing thousands of artists and millions of photographs to the Baylor Street hill, and closed when development finally caught up with it. "People need good news," Scull says. So she rebuilt it bigger.
The new HOPE is a nine-acre campus at 741 Dalton Lane, along the Colorado River in East Austin's emerging Dog's Head district, minutes from the airport. The buildings are arranged to spell H-O-P-E, legible from the windows of every plane landing at Austin-Bergstrom. Inside the letters: a 6,000-square-foot indoor gallery, a café and bar, a rooftop, and walls that never stop changing.
HOPE is a programming engine as much as a place. Creative kids camps, school field trips with Austin ISD and Del Valle ISD, makers markets, sunset concerts against the arena wall, and a mural program covered by National Geographic, NPR, Fast Company, and Texas Monthly. In 2026 the Austin Chronicle named it a Best of Austin winner: the best place to take budding artists.
For a place at that scale, Andi didn't need a vendor. She needed a partner who could build the whole thing. So we did: full stack. We designed and fabricated the monumental dimensional "HOPE OUTDOOR GALLERY" letterforms that crown the landmark wall, the corten-steel elements finished with white paint drips that speak the park's own language, and the red Nouns "noggles" sculpture craned into place at the gate. Then we kept going: the signage and wayfinding across the campus, the retail space, and the coffee shop.
Challenge
Same heart, new home: at many times the scale. The job was to make a brand-new, nine-acre landmark feel like it had always been there.
You cannot fake a place like HOPE. It is built on years of Austin's creative fabric: thousands of artists, millions of photographs, a community that owns it. Move it across town and the risk is obvious: it reads as a copy of itself.
The new identity had to be monumental without being corporate, polished without being precious: loud enough to hold its own against a wall of graffiti, and rough enough to belong to it. Blackened and corten steel at architectural scale, engineered to stand against the Texas sky, with a street-art soul.
Solution
Same craft as the corporate boardroom: turned all the way up.
We treated a public art park with the same rigor we bring to a Fortune-100 tower. The letterforms and the sculpture were designed, engineered, fabricated in-house, and installed by one team: dimensional steel sized to read from the road and detailed to reward a close look. The paint drips aren't an accident; they're a finish, applied on purpose.
The signage was designed as street art first, then productized for the gallery's retail store, so the identity earns its keep on the shelf as well as on the wall.
And we did the part a landmark actually needs: we came in early and stayed close. Across reorganizations, partner changes, and vendor decisions, we advised founder Andi Scull as a member of the team, not a line on an invoice, because this is a place, and a person, we love.
Result
A living canvas, powered by Austin's artist community: with a mark to match.
HOPE reopened with its heart intact and a new landmark to announce it: the letterforms on the wall, the sculpture at the gate, the walls filling again with paint. Today the campus runs camps, field trips, markets, and concerts year-round, and the walls get repainted faster than anyone can photograph them. Same heart, new home.
This is the loud, public, human end of what we do: proof that the craft we bring to a boardroom belongs on a graffiti wall too. Design for people, built by people who care. Turned all the way up.
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