HOPE Outdoor Gallery
Austin's beloved graffiti park, reborn on eight 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, the retail and café.
When HOPE Outdoor Gallery moved from its legendary Baylor Street hill to a purpose-built, eight-acre home in East Austin's new Dog's Head district, 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 grew out of Scull’s 2006 collaboration with Shepard Fairey, spent years drawing thousands of artists to the legendary Baylor Street hill, and closed when development pressure finally caught up with it. “People need good news,” Scull says, so she rebuilt it bigger.
The new HOPE is a purpose-built, eight-acre campus in East Austin’s emerging Dog’s Head district, along the Colorado River east of US-183. The buildings themselves are arranged to spell H‑O‑P‑E: legible from the windows of planes landing at Austin-Bergstrom. 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, eight-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.
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. 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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