The role models for the Austrian construction company Gropyus are technology corporations like Apple, Tesla or Netflix. Just like digital services and technologies, housing should also function as a subscription model, with the residents as users and the home as a place that constantly updates itself.
While their timber-hybrid hardware is largely standardized, customization takes place through their complete smart home network. In the background, the Gropyus operating system monitors the building’s ecological footprint, making it a cradle-to-cradle optimized zero-energy home.
“The best of design, comfort and functionality.” is the motto of Gropyus. Their taste in typography could not be described more aptly. The Berlin-based designer Julian Thiel chose Pangea as the brand font, a well-developed sans family that combines humanistic and geometric design features, i.e. comfort and function. On the Gropyus website as well as in the app, Pangea and Pangea Text perform excellently, exuding confidence and credibility.
When it comes to sustainability, Pangea is on the same wavelength as Gropyus. Its designer Christoph Koeberlin wanted to make a continuous contribution to the environment from the outset. Since the publication of the typeface, a quarter of its royalties have been donated to three international organizations that reforest the rainforest in cooperation with the local population.
In July 2021, Koeberlin and Fontwerk announced that over 50,000 trees had already been planted with his ongoing donation.
But wait a minute: building wooden houses, planting trees – a typeface as an agent of transformation in the economic cycle… This has never happened before and should set a precedent.
