Life. Well Crafted.

Gateway to Hickory, NC

As part of AMEC Foster Wheeler’s (currently Wood) project team, Signature Design worked with the City of Hickory to express its theme, “Life. Well Crafted,” by using designs and content that convey Hickory’s history as a furniture and textile center, as well as its transformation into a trendy center for crafts and technology. 

Services

  • Way-showing System

  • Sign Program

  • Interpretive Public Art Program

  • Interpretive Signs and Plaques

  • Themed Retaining Walls & Seating

Design Approach

The City of Hickory, North Carolina has undergone many changes since it lost its standing as the furniture capital of the world, but Hickory has proven an adaptable place recently building a 1.5-mile “City Walk” that connects residents and visitors to the university, shops, services, and offices and developing public amenities that reflect the city’s transformation. 

Signature Design was instrumental in creating designs that capture the city past and present. We began by creating a city gateway at U.S. Highway 321 and 70. We developed the themes of craftsmanship, resiliency, adaptation, and community, and then looked to nature to inspire the form for the new gateway. An overlapping “Seasonal Leaf” sculpture along a key highway access point now serves as an attractive entrance to the blossoming downtown area.

Along the City Walk, Signature Design created several public art attractions including “light spinners” that rotate and twist and a “human kaleidoscope” in Union Square that takes inspiration from the city’s history of craftmanship. This furniture-like form with a prism-mirrored interior and LED lights allows people to enter and witness themselves and others as a human kaleidoscope. Located in the renovated historic Mill District, stacked mill crates provide seating and archways, as well as historical references to the products manufactured in the mills.

Innovative way-showing triangular light poles line the trail and point to amenities and attractions, and brass plaques embedded in the trail reveal interpretive stories.