BEACON: Four Storeys, Hundreds of Authors

BEACON runs 1 to 11 October 2026 at HOTA, Home of the Arts, Gold Coast, as part of BLEACH Festival. It is free, no ticket is required, it stands for the full eleven days, and the choir sings at sunset each day

A four-storey tower goes up beside the Nerang River on 1 October and stands for eleven days. It carries pattern and text across its faces, turns neon after dark, and at sunset each day a community choir of two hundred sings at the base of it. Entry is free and no ticket is required.

The work is called BEACON. It is led by the Gold Coast company Everybody NOW! and designed by the British artist Morag Myerscough, and it anchors the fifteenth BLEACH Festival at HOTA.

Hundreds of Gold Coast residents made its surfaces, in workshops, over the preceding months. That detail is usually filed under community engagement and skipped. It is the most interesting thing about the object.

Myerscough Went to Milan Because of Memphis

She says so herself. After Lamb & Shirley she spent six months in Milan in 1990, working at Studio De Lucchi, and told Eye magazine she went to Italy because Memphis had obsessed her at college. What she took from it was permission: Memphis implied “you could make furniture, you could do textiles, you could do anything”.

Michele De Lucchi co-founded Memphis with Ettore Sottsass in 1981. Between 1975 and 1977 he had been assistant to Adolfo Natalini at Florence, and Natalini founded Superstudio.

So the line runs Natalini, then De Lucchi, then a six-month studio stint, then thirty-five years of public work, then a tower on the Gold Coast. We followed the same movement to a gallery in Byron Bay earlier this year. This is the other road out of Milan.

Sottsass Put Decoration above Function

Memphis started as a polemic and only became a look afterwards.

Sottsass gathered a group of mostly young designers in 1981 around the position that surface decoration outranked everything modernism said should matter. The laminates, the unbalanced geometry, the colours borrowed from motel signage were an attack on good taste, made by people who understood good taste completely.

It sold badly. De Lucchi has been quoted since saying the whole thing was a catastrophe and no kind of success, and Sottsass wound the group up in 1987, six years after starting it.

Neon, Swatch Books and a Structure You Walk Through

Myerscough works from a fixed core palette and adds to it per project. The additions are usually neon-fluoro, chosen because they alter whatever sits beside them and because they read differently at each end of the day.

That explains the dusk switch at BEACON. The structure is not simply lit at night. The colours are selected so they do one thing in Queensland sun and another under artificial light.

She does not trust screen colour either. For an earlier Australian commission she had paint swatch books posted to her in London, because the local ranges did not match what she could specify at home, and chose from the physical chips. The paint company Resene is among BEACON’s supporters, which suggests the same process ran again.

The tower is also not a monument you stand and look at. HOTA’s own description has hand-painted patterned entrances and adorned gateways, with shapes that move in the wind and light passing through the volume. You go inside it.

Holly Ringland’s poetry sits on the structure. Myerscough used the same method in Stockholm in 2015, where the poet Yemisi Blake worked with young people on the city’s outskirts to write text for the central tower of a scaffolding-and-shipping-container build, and the young people who painted that installation were paid for the work.

Corporate Memphis Is Not Descended from Memphis

There is a second thing carrying the Memphis name, and you have almost certainly been asked to imitate it.

Small heads, elastic limbs, skin in lilac or teal, striding across a landing page while a form loads. Facebook approached the Los Angeles studio Buck in 2017 to rebuild its entire illustration system, and the result launched the following year as Alegria, from the Spanish for joy. Within a few years the same visual language was working for Google, YouTube, Slack, Lyft and Airbnb. Designers nicknamed it Corporate Memphis and have used the nickname as an insult ever since.

The nickname gets the ancestry wrong. It was coined as a comparison, because the flat geometry and loud palette resembled the Italian group’s work. Buck were not continuing Sottsass. Critics reached for the nearest recognisable reference and the label stuck.

Alegria Has an Author, and She Is Rarely Named

This is the part the five-year pile-on managed to miss.

Alegria was pitched by Xoana Herrera, an Argentinian illustrator then at Buck, who is credited on the studio’s own site as Senior Art Director and Design Lead on the project. She has said the style was deliberately adjusted for replicability as it developed, and that the characters are “designed for expression, rather than individual identity”.

That is the whole argument, stated by the person who made it. The figures are anonymous because anonymity was the specification. Buck built a system so it could be executed by anyone, anywhere, at any scale, and their own case study is fairly blunt about the result: “There’s many imitators, but there’s only one Alegria.”

So the authorlessness lives in the output, by design. The author is a named woman whose work an industry spent five years mocking without crediting her.

BEACON Accumulates Authors Instead

BEACON runs the same surface-first method in the opposite direction.

Its faces were made by hundreds of named people in one named city. The project is led by a local company rather than hosting a visiting designer. The Welcome to Country is by the Kombumerri artist Lann Levinge. The choir is two hundred residents singing an arrangement of a poem by a writer who grew up there.

Move the tower to Brisbane and most of its meaning stays behind.

Myerscough’s mantra is that if you make happy those who are near, those who are far will come. It reads as a slogan until you notice it describes a sequence, and that the people who are near are the ones holding the brushes.

Ask Whether Anyone Can Sign It

Which gives any designer a usable test, and colour is the wrong variable to watch.

The question is whether anyone can be named as the author of what you are making, and whether removing the specific people who made it would change what it means. If the answer is no, you have built a system, and systems are valuable things to build. Herrera built an extremely good one.

What you cannot then do is claim the work produces belonging or warmth or community. Those are effects of particular people being implicated in something, and a system is designed to work without particular people in it.

The Look Is Cheap, the Process Is Not

A council commissions the Myerscough look without the Myerscough process, because the look is cheap and the process is expensive. What goes up is a mural presented as a shared object.

Whether it works is observable. You can go and look, and the answer is usually that it does not.

BEACON and Alegria illustrate the choice cleanly because they look so alike. Both are bright, geometric and cheerful. One was built to be executable by anyone at all. The other was built by people who live within walking distance of it. A photograph of either tells you almost nothing about which is which, which is a reasonable argument against judging much design work from photographs.

What to Watch at Sunset

If you go, the interesting moment is not the neon coming on.

Watch the posture of the people standing at the base of it, and whether they are behaving like an audience or like owners. Those are easy enough to tell apart in person.

The Gold Coast is a hard test for any of this. It is a city assembled out of tourism and speculative development, where belonging has to be built because not much of it was inherited.

In 1981 Sottsass and his collaborators said design should concern itself with relationships and with feeling good rather than with function and taste. They said it as a provocation, were ridiculed for it at length, and closed the group six years later. Forty-five years on, the style that borrowed the name is a stock asset library with a forgotten author, and the one that inherited the argument is a tower with two hundred people singing at the foot of it.

Editorial note: This article was produced independently and does not constitute paid promotion, sponsored content, or a paid placement of any kind. Design Magazine has no commercial relationship with BLEACH Festival, HOTA or Everybody NOW!, and chose to cover BEACON on editorial grounds alone.