Château de GrandsonCASTLE, RECAST

Château de Grandson has been around for roughly a thousand years. Which is plenty of time to have several lives. Perched above Lake Neuchâtel, the medieval fortress has been a seat of power, a battlefield, a prison, a hospital, a tobacco factory and a museum. Among other things. In 1476, it hosted one of the Burgundian Wars’ most famous battles. After fifteen years of restoration, Grandson reopened in 2026 as a completely reimagined museum. The ambition wasn’t simply to preserve the past. The past is quite good at surviving on its own. The idea was to make it speak to the present. And to whoever happens to walk through the door.

Castles come with baggage. Knights. Battles. Heraldry. School trips. Very thick walls. Even thicker history. The obvious thing would have been to polish the past, label it, light it nicely and ask everyone to admire it from a respectful distance. Grandson wanted something else. A museum where the past could provoke the present. Where a medieval fortress could fascinate a historian, an eight-year-old, a teenager, or someone who mostly came for the view. Our challenge was to create an identity capable of holding all these people (and all these centuries) together. Serious about history, without being solemn about it. Because a thousand years is a long time. It doesn’t need to feel like one.

The idea was hiding in plain sight: confrontation. Grandson has seen plenty of it. Armies, ambitions, centuries colliding. We simply gave confrontation a more useful job. We turned it into conversation. Past meets present. Knights meet smartphones. Heraldry meets contemporary typography. A skateboard occasionally meets a medieval hall. That friction became the identity. We borrowed the visual language of heraldry and dragged it, quite deliberately, into today. Bold type. Sharp contrasts. Radical shifts in scale. Compositions where things that shouldn’t necessarily belong together somehow do. The same principle runs through signage, exhibitions, digital communication and social content. Deliberate anachronisms make centuries collapse into seconds. Knights take selfies. Medieval symbols behave badly. History stops behaving like history. And that’s the point. The identity doesn’t simplify the past to make it accessible. It gives more people a way into its complexity. A castle was built to keep people out. A thousand years later, we helped bring them together.