The Halo Monolith: An Exercise in Theatrical Restraint
Build It and They Will Come
Like many successful ideas, the concept for the Halo wall began, initially, with a different purpose in mind. We were trying to come up with a compelling experience to share Halo at a smart cities conference in Portland. We had two aims. The first was to provide an area that functioned as a platform for engaging people. The second was to create a compelling argument for for Halo’s role in the future of connected municpalities.
The initial concept was a simple embodiment of brand that was intended to be modular for reuse at future conferences.
After some deliberation, much of it around budget and timeline, we opted to let the argument be crafted by Halo’s biggest booster, Tyler Phillipi. We provided him with a simple presentation on iPad as well as a brochure intended to be given to people after he gets them excited about Halo. This first Halo area concept was shelved but we returned to it when we found a need to create another Halo area in a different context,
Orating Versus Serving
While the smart cities concept was anchored to the idea of a central point from which the brand could be broadcast and which required the ever-presence of a brand ambassador, we now found a need for a brand area focused on service, interaction, and the piquing of interest. Back to the drawing board! Literally.
Fleshing It Out
We sought to get a better handle on design decisions by building some simple renderings. This let us get a general idea of the sense of space articulated by the direction we were going.
Spec It. Build It.
In order to meet the exigencies of budget and timeline, and after gaining a better understanding of the site and the needs of the sales team, we decided our effort would best spent on building the wall component only (or, as I often prefer to call it… "the monolith"). Much of our design for this component had been worked out in previous iterations. We chose a local fabricator, ADX, to work with on the design and build. After some preliminary measurements on site we put together a detailed spec. ADX used this to generate some working renderings.
ADX worked with their own subs to do the steel work and powder-coating. They did the final assembly in the shop. The monolith was sufficiently impressive when the preliminary shell arrived! The final piece was installed at Halo’s first dealership in time for launch.
