Dynamo youth center building and logo

“The cultural youth centre Dynamo is a social service organization which provides practical assistance to young people in matters of schooling, housing, financial help and employment.” — diederendirrix architects, 2006

The name protrudes from the building in faceted, blocky letters that are unmistakably based on ITC Pioneer. The typeface’s shadow is gone and some strokes and widths modified, but otherwise it’s quite felicitous how nicely the modularity of Pioneer matches the grid of the façade segments, with its angles echoed in the faceting. The letters with strokes that extend beyond the baseline and capline (‘Y, N, A, M’) are not found in the digital version of ITC Pioneer, but they were in Tom Carnase and Ronne Bonder’s 1970 original, perhaps most famously seen in the logo for Shaft.

The official logo for the Dynamo center is less … dynamic, omitting the swash extensions so the word fits in a flat rectangle. Corners were also softened in the mark.

The logo appearing on the building dates back to at least 1988 (see the flyer below for the Open Air festival of ’88). The Dynamo rock club was founded in 1981 and the Open Air heavy metal festival was launched in 1986 to celebrate their fifth anniversary. It’s clear that the logo was inspired by the aesthetic of metal band logos like Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Megadeth.