DBL: Dedalo Building Lab

Context

Dedalo Building Lab is a multidisciplinary design lab born from the shared passion and vision of four friends and ex-university colleagues — Riccardo Bartali, Andrea Crudeli, Giulio Fazio and Leonardo Magursi — who decided to found an architecture and engineering firm in Florence.

Problem

Twenty of the biggest Tuscan architecture firms predicted against it, and DBL’s founders were advised, almost unanimously, not to start something so new and adventurous. They did it anyway — the same instinct that always pushed this group of people to do something more than the average, to treat sufficiency as never enough.

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes…

The blocks that don’t fit the prepared hole aren’t wrong — the rest is just standardized, uniform, repetitive, banal.

Concept

Simple, modular, democratic elements — a system flexible enough to build whatever imagination can bring to mind, the same way DBL itself refuses to fit into a pre-made hole.

Solution

Brand and typeface

The brand came together with an alphabet built to reflect the same values: simple, modular, economical, flexible. Dedalo Builds (v.01) was born from rotating and composing the letters D, B and L into DBL’s symbol and logo — paired with Founders Grotesk for the typographic system, TT Norms by TypeType as the corporate font, and Dedalo Builds itself reserved for display and playful use.

Website

Next came the website: a showcase for all of DBL’s projects, activities and ideas — a portfolio unveiling the team’s multidisciplinary, transversal capabilities, from architecture and engineering to film direction, photography, BIM and exhibition design.