161 Boxing Club

161 Boxing Club is located on Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto just off the busy commercial and retail strip of Queen Street West. Its urban location is iconic — poised on the shoulder of the city's high density urban core. Denegri Bessai Studio was tasked with telegraphing  the graphic language of the club - a striking axonometric boxing ring - onto the façade of the building, connecting the Romanesque third floor interior space of the gym to the exterior and to the city beyond.

The architectural lightbox sign serves to  structure the visual hierarchy of the building-   a church that  was masked in the 1940s with an art deco masonry façade. By leveraging the building's symmetry, the newly added glowing element crowns its central axis naturally leading the eye and the body upward towards the club.

The venue acts primarily as a gym but also doubles as an event space; the signage morphs from a composed info-graphic by day to a glowing beacon by night, taking its place amongst the urban markers that make the neighborhood so vibrant.