Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui closed in 2019 for earthquake strengthening. Seven years on, it has reopened—reimagined around te taiao, the natural world, with growth and renewal echoed in its forms, colours, and details. Tihei worked with Athfield Architects to weave mana whenua perspectives into the building, making it a living cultural taonga.
The Wayfinding was developed in close collaboration with Chris Mitchell (Design Manager, Wellington City Council), Arihia McClutchie (Principal Advisor Māori), Athfield Architects (architecture), and Extended Whānau (brand identity and Pihi typeface). Jono Ashman SignBiz carried out prototyping, fabrication, and installation.
Wayfinding Strategy
Early workshops identified that the wayfinding system would need to serve two core user types—Browsers, who explore organically through themes, visual cues, and zone nomenclature, and Seekers, who need precise navigation via floor directories, catalogue devices, and column-oriented directional signage. The system also accounts for accessibility needs spanning low vision, mobility, hearing, cognitive, and neurodiverse users.
The strategy is grounded in te taiao and the idea of interconnectedness—the transition from whenua to moana—reflecting Te Matapihi’s role bridging Te Ngākau Civic Square to the wider pedestrian network. Multiple tomo (entrances) open the building as a covered extension of the square and city, drawing the vibrancy of the street inside. The column grid acts as a structured anchor for information throughout the building, with adaptable fingerpost sign formats reinforcing that street-inside character.
Nomenclature
Nomenclature reflects Te Matapihi’s cultural and linguistic values while ensuring clarity and inclusivity. All signage features Te Reo Māori first, followed by English, giving equal prominence to both languages. Informed by Tihei's research and developed with Arihia McClutchie (Principal Advisor Māori), naming draws on indigenous flora and fauna and the whenua-to-moana theme, using language itself as a subtle navigational tool, with bilingual descriptors providing functional clarity.
Te Reo Māori and English appear in the same typeface, the same weight, the same size. No differentiation. Hierarchy is established through language order alone, with Te Reo Māori placed first—an act of restoration, not decoration, for a language that has been systematically marginalised. It is also the language unique to this place. English is spoken everywhere; Te Reo Māori is spoken here. That specificity is what makes Aotearoa legible as Aotearoa, to its own people and to visitors, now and into the future.
This equal typographic treatment is grounded in neuroscience, not aesthetic preference. Bilingual readers identify the language of a word automatically and unconsciously within approximately 200 milliseconds—well below conscious awareness. Both languages activate simultaneously, and the brain selects the appropriate one without typographic guidance. Monolingual readers are equally fast at detecting an unfamiliar word in that same 200-millisecond window, even when it follows their own language's spelling rules. The brain is already sorting. Typographic differentiation adds nothing—the work happens regardless.
Materiality
Architecturally, the postmodern aesthetic—visible construction elements, exposed steel mesh fences—is echoed in the wayfinding's materiality. Fingerpost signs are mounted using the same arrangement of brackets and bolts used for lighting, establishing a close relationship with the building's architecture.
The tension here was balancing two references: a nod to the postmodern architecture on one side, and a reflection of te taiao on the other. The solution was to bend the fingerposts—a form that references the lichen installation in the Te Ngākau Tomo, while turning the signs themselves into instruments of nature. Angled into the path of light entering the building, they catch and display sunlight as it shifts throughout the day and week, translating the rhythms of the natural world into the physical fabric of the wayfinding system.
Colour
This lichen form carries through to the stack ends, with movable leaves and stack inserts. Since Tihei’s colour study and Athfield Architects’ colour choices already used colour and pattern to differentiate levels and zones through carpet tiles and wall finishes, the wayfinding palette was kept simple and monochromatic rather than colour-coding functions or floors. The full system combines directories, level markers, and fingerpost signs. Horizontal type indicates direction; vertical type designates arrival—a distinction carried through consistently to doors and stack ends.
Typefaces
Early investigations into typeface choice explored a wide range of approaches, from grotesks to expressive modular fonts with a postmodernist flavour. The initial front-runner was Söhne, by Kris Sowersby of Wellington foundry Klim. Söhne is a contemporary homage to Akzidenz-Grotesk, and its character felt right: a grotesk introduces deliberate contrast to the existing historic serif building signage and the newly introduced serif typography on the reimagined nīkau palms and the 12-metre piece on the building’s southern façade that brings J.C. Sturm’s poem Brown Optimism into public view.
The use of a grotesk also reinforces the ‘Urban Wayfinding—Inside’ concept—early grotesks emerged in the 19th century, becoming the dominant language of mid-century advertising, posters, and signage. A deliberate decision was made early on that the wayfinding should not reflect WCC brand identity, and Söhne shares little with the WCC brand fonts Guardian Sans and Guardian Egyptian.
We landed on Die Grotesk, also by Sowersby. Where Söhne is a homage to Akzidenz-Grotesk, Die Grotesk was ‘shaped in the long shadow of Helvetica’—itself a typeface whose design process fundamentally relied on Akzidenz-Grotesk. The lineage runs deep.
Choosing a typeface from within that heritage is an interesting decision for a project that aims in many ways to help decolonise Aotearoa. But the parallel holds. The building went through a process of honest reckoning with what it was, structural reinforcement, and re-emergence as something that functions better while remaining itself. Die Grotesk went through exactly the same process—twenty years of Sowersby working through his relationship with a tradition he inherited without choosing, then making something that functions better while looking like the thing everyone already knows. The decolonising work at Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui is doing the same: not tearing the institution down and starting over, but reinforcing the structure and insisting on equal standing within it.
Invisibility is the point—wayfinding shouldn’t announce its typeface. The fact that Die Grotesk reads as Helvetica to most people means it works without friction. We simply wanted the words to be read, easily and effortlessly, without the type becoming a discussion. But underneath that surface it's made by a Wellington designer who grew up with Helvetica as colonial residue, processed that inheritance consciously, and made something new out of it. Die Grotesk, and the decision to use it, carries subtle embedded meaning.
The last layer of wayfinding is experienced through beacon graphics for key locations, set in Pihi—a bespoke typeface developed by Extended Whānau as part of the Te Matapihi brand identity, based on the idea of a seed. Pihi is used for beacon graphics, window manifestations, and the bespoke naming of certain rooms, allowing the wayfinding typography to remain consistent across the system while carrying a distinct layer of cultural meaning at key locations.