The Santa Monica Airport campus is home to a collection of commercially leased buildings occupied by creative firms, artists, and cultural organizations including the Ruskin Theatre and artist studios at 2800 Airport Avenue. The structures span five decades of construction, from corrugated metal hangars of the 1930s and 1940s to modernist office buildings of the 1980s. Decades of ad hoc additions consisting of conduits, mechanical sheds, miscellaneous appurtenances have left the campus visually fragmented and lacking any coherent identity along Airport Avenue.
The design concept takes its inspiration from the dazzle camouflage schemes applied to Allied naval vessels during World War I. Originally developed not to hide ships but to confuse enemy range-finders through disorienting geometric patterns of high-contrast color, dazzle painting is a graphic strategy that can be applied to any surface regardless of its underlying shape or condition. Here, the same logic works in reverse: rather than concealing, the dazzle schemes reveal and transform disparate buildings into a family of bold, individual landmarks that share a visual language without looking alike.
Each building becomes its own composition. The unsightly accumulations of decades – the conduits, sheds, and additions – are absorbed into the overall patterned scheme rather than hidden or removed, becoming part of the graphic field. At the campus scale, the buildings read as a fleet of individual “ships” moored along the sea of parking lots that line Airport Avenue, unified by approach and distinct in execution. Four buildings have been painted to date.
Complementing the painting program, JWA designed a new system of aluminum blade wayfinding signs to replace the deteriorating and dated signage across the campus. The new signs are more durable, more legible, and visually consistent with the bold graphic character of the painting schemes.
