Client
Te Fare Tauhiti Nui
Deliverable
Illustrated Map
Format
110 × 110 cm
Role
Illustration & Art Direction
We designed the map of Maison de la Culture with the same visual ambition of the world’s great theme parks.
Te Fare Tauhiti Nui — La Maison de la Culture in Tahiti — is the beating heart of Polynesia’s cultural life: its theatres, its library, its gardens and stages, the Heiva festival that fills it every year. We were asked to design its map. As soon as we got this project in hand, we knew we wanted to make a memorable map : the kind that can bring dreams in the eyes of the children and their parents. We wanted to create a map that makes you want to step inside before you’ve even arrived.
More than just a place ?
A theme-park map doesn’t just tell you where things are. It promises an experience. It turns a place into a territory, buildings into landmarks, a visit into an exploration. The Maison de la Culture deserved that. It isn’t an administrative building — it’s where a people gathers, celebrates and learns. The map had to make that felt at a single glance.
A world, not a diagram
We worked in isometric view rather than flat, to give depth and the feeling of a world instead of a diagram. We photographed the site first, to study its real volumes and atmosphere. Then six weeks of production: moodboard, sketch, colour, through to large-format print files at 110 × 110 cm. Every zone — gardens, stages, halls, vegetation — drawn to be read just as easily by a child as by a visitor in a hurry.
A map is also a portrait
A good map is wayfinding. But it’s also a portrait. This one says: this place matters, come explore it. It welcomes the person who has never set foot inside, and gives pride to the one who knows it by heart. A tool you navigate with, and an object to be proud of.
We believe Polynesian culture deserves the same visual ambition as the world’s great destinations. Nothing less.