Where Brand Becomes Neighbourhood

Architecture and Built Environment

Neues Amt Altona eG (NAA) is a cooperative building project in Hamburg. The former Altona tax office is being transformed into a new creative hub that combines sustainable architecture with a concept built around community and creative work. The repurposed building houses a co-working space, artists' studios and a neighbourhood meeting place.

At the start of the project, Stan Hema developed the visual and verbal identity for the building project, with three clear goals: winning members for the cooperative, raising equity capital and letting co-working desks.

Based on focus groups, we developed a brand story that makes people want to help shape the city of tomorrow. At its core are community and common good – positioning the NAA as a counter-model to conventional urban development.

At the centre of the new identity is a keyvisual that picks up on the story of the site: a square bracket, inspired by the open input field found on classic official forms. Just like the NAA, it creates space for people's ideas and perspectives. The bracket holds the brand identity together "quite literally" – on the building, on the website, on stationery, on social media and on the podcast. Alongside brand design, we were responsible for web development and copywriting.

The result: at the opening, two years after the brand launch, the cooperative has grown by 216 members (+120 per cent) and gained €1m in equity capital (+71 per cent).