Brand Experience/2023

WINDOW SCENE

The format had worked in a hall and then in a garden. What it had never done was run without a building at all — and the site on offer was the open upper deck of a working sports complex, with no walls, no ceiling and a city on every side.

Client: Banaye Bartar
Place: Imam Reza Sports Complex, Mashhad
Year: 2023
Category: Brand Experience

The challenge

What changed

The whole edition moved to the hours between dusk and ten at night. A route was drawn across the deck in red and the brands were set along it as lit objects, so the thing holding the exhibition together after sunset was light rather than architecture. The building's own facade became the signage: one letter to a banner, down the side of the complex.

The outcome

WINDOW ran for the first time with no hall to run in — three evenings, the same invitation-only audience, and a format that turned out to be a set of decisions rather than a kind of room.

Edition: 3rdEdition
Evenings, by invitation: 3Evenings, by invitation
Doors, each evening: 17:30—22:30Doors, each evening

WINDOW SCENE was the platform's third edition and its first without a building. It ran over three evenings in July 2023 on the upper deck of the Imam Reza Sports Complex in Mashhad, from half past five until half past ten each night — the whole edition, deliberately, inside the hours the sky is changing.

Working outdoors after dark inverts what an exhibition designer usually has. There is no ceiling to hang from, no wall to build against and no way to control the light for the first two hours; what there is instead is a horizon, and a set of objects that stop being furniture the moment they are the only lit things in a very large dark space. The stands were built as free-standing structures on a red route, each one legible from a distance, and the lighting was designed for the transition rather than for either end of it.

The identity did the same job at the scale of the building. The complex's own facade carried the title one letter to a banner, so the edition announced itself to the street it stood on before a visitor reached the gate — which is the closest the series has come to putting the exhibition's name on the city rather than on a wall inside it.

The complex from above with the edition's route drawn across its upper deck in pink

The open deck set and empty before the doors: red ground, white stands, the city behind

The red route running the length of the deck between white stands, under an open sky

The same route with the edition running, visitors along it in late afternoon light

A stand hung as a picture gallery, seating in the middle of it and cloud overhead

A stand under a black canopy cut with skylights, a white table and chairs beneath it

A wall of door hardware set out in a row on a white stand against the sky

A pavilion of black steel shelving open on three sides, a table and chairs in its corner

A stand of green counters and dark sample panels under a broken sky

A sanitaryware stand in blue and white, its fittings mounted on the panel behind

A white curtain lifting across the front of a stand, low tables laid behind it

A tile stand built as a checkerboard wall, one chair and a cactus in front of it

A stand of folded timber panels standing on a pale blue floor, café chairs alongside

Brass taps and showers mounted on timber blocks against a wall lit deep blue

Tables on the deck after dark, a neon line drawn above them and the route glowing red

The lit 2023 sign over the deck at night, WINDOW SCENE PRIVATE EXHIBITION set beneath it

A child standing inside a lit neon arch on the red route after dark

The yellow WINDOW SCENE banner against a black sky, the moon beside it

The deck under a full moon, the stands lit and the last visitors between them

Stacked cups printed with the WINDOW SCENE mark on the hospitality counter

The WINDOW SCENE apron worn by the hospitality crew

The banayebartar mark on a small sign at the counter, the floor out of focus behind it

Two visitors talking on the deck at sunset, the stands and the skyline behind them

WINDOW

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