The Lydian
Location
Denver, CO
Completed
2018
Clients
Palisade Partners
Confluence Companies
Fabricator
Boyd Sign Systems
Awards
2019 City of Denver Mayor’s Design Awards, Density by Design Category
2018 NAIOP Colorado Multi-Family Project of the Year
2018 Downtown Denver Partnership, Downtown Denver Award
After the success of the Wheatley Flats down the block, Palisade Partners and Confluence Companies turned to ArtHouse Design to develop a thoughtful, iconic name, brand, identity, signage, wayfinding and public art program for this mixed-use project along the historic Welton Street corridor. Taking inspiration from the local community’s history as the jazz center of Denver, ArtHouse devised the name ‘The Lydian’ as an homage to the lydian chromatic concept scale, a common musical motif throughout jazz history. Greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane made use of this scale in their music during Five Points’ heyday as the Harlem of the West, a nickname coined for the area’s African-American jazz scene, a result of local segregation policies.
With the area’s rich local history in mind, ArtHouse created an identity that evokes jazz-age typography in an updated, modern way with a subtle gilded gradient. The identity was then applied to interior and exterior project identification signage, including a custom mosaic ground sign with hand-laid tiles. ArtHouse also created ADA compliant code signage, developed clever names from project amenities like The Lydian Club for the complex’s club room, Lido Deck for the pool and Gymnasium for the fitness center, invoking jazz-era vocabulary for an additional branded experience. Similarly to the Wheatley, ArtHouse also created a custom sculpture for the project’s DURA requirement that tells the history of the Lydian scale through time and in Five Points.