Wayfinding for a different night, every night
Gashouder is the new cultural venue of Amsterdam where music, art, performance and nightlife come together. Its grand main hall is endlessly versatile: monumental in scale, human in experience. Silo developed a wayfinding system rooted in Gashouder’s identity.
Client
Gashouder
Partners
Design developed in collaboration with Job van Dort / Studio Zeil
Project partners: Children of the Light, Inside Outside, Buro van Stigt, Fiction Factory, OneEightyOne and SummitDIS
Space for experimentation
Located in the green tranquillity of Cultural Park Westergas, Gashouder’s multidisciplinary programme ranges from live acts and nightlife to performance art and immersive installations. With room for up to 3,500 visitors, it caters to artists who have outgrown clubs, yet still want to keep the intimacy of their shows.
Gashouder offers space for innovative artistic productions that don’t fit anywhere else in the city. A new basement level adds high-quality facilities front-of-house and backstage. But it brings new wayfinding challenges.
Flexibility and clarity
Visitors to Gashouder are relaxed, positive and tolerant of minor obstacles. They navigate socially: following friends, moving with the group, getting distracted. To create a visitor experience that feels natural and faithful to the venue, we focused on the primary operational processes and basic visitor needs. The outcome is a strategy with two drivers: information that adapts to every event, and clear guidance between levels.
Gashouder’s versatility is a core value, so key routing information can be tailored to the audience and respond to crowd flows in real time. Vertical circulation is where this counts most: two sets of staircases connect the basement to the entrance zone and the main hall. At these locations, decision points and bottlenecks coincide. Stand-out signage plays the room, from nudging people to stay for another drink when the basement gets crowded, to temporarily closing access. This helps keep crowds moving safely.
True to form
At Gashouder, what you see is what you get. Nothing is made to seem bigger than it is. The creative concept follows this principle and draws on the logic, function and story of the building.
The architectural form and industrial structure inspire a framework for information: a modular graphic system that adapts to the space, combining multiple dynamic layers. Through contrast in materials and execution, it creates unexpected visual connections to the interior. The design ties industrial heritage to the digital age: solid, live, imperfect yet unambiguous. Every interaction with a sign becomes a tangible experience: direct, intuitive and in motion.
Ensemble work
Reimagining Gashouder took close collaboration between disciplines. We developed the design with Job van Dort, building on input from Gashouder’s in-house creative team, the artistic perspective of Children of the Light and Inside Outside’s interior interventions. Together with Fiction Factory and SummitDIS, we worked out the materialisation, detailing and execution.
The foundations are in place. Now the goal is experimentation and artistic freedom: challenging the system through adaptation, expansion and reordering.
“Through contrast in materials and execution, the wayfinding experience creates unexpected visual connections to the interior.”
