(EN) POTATO HEAD

Potato Head Studios, designed by OMA, is the latest edition to the creative village featuring hotels, bars, restaurants, music venues, wellness & creative spaces, and a sustainability lab. As a local epicentre for culture, music, and vernacular design, the site required exterior and interior wayfinding that would consolidate the many destinations and promote the ideology of the brand as an advocate for authentic Balinese culture and design within a circular economy.

The vision of Potato Head is to build a space for creative engagement, rather than consumption, by empowering design to foster a dialogue about ecological solutions for the greater good of the community.

The site was conceptualised as three main buildings, each given a symbolic code and formalised as sculptural totems – a contemporary gesture of Balinese culture. These bold rough formed statues are pigmented and feature aggregate from by-products of the building construction. The freestanding sculptural stack of symbols and arrows direct to destinations with text made from using waste from Potato Head’s hotels and restaurants. Inside the hotel wall mounted wayfinding, directories and amenity symbols feature a sandwich of contextual and recycled plastic materials and are over scaled and imperfect to cope with the monolithic brutalist architecture – a testimony to how creative thinking can support culture and the environment.