There were early indications that Aaron Scales was destined to leave his creative mark on the world.
Growing up in Lexington, Scales – who makes up one half of the Lexington-based design team BroCoLoCo – didn’t center his free time on trips to the racetrack or Rupp Arena, but rather on conceptualizing design ideas; as early as age 5, he was winning statewide writing and illustration competitions. Homeschooled, Scales and his four younger siblings learned early on that hard work and time management opened up opportunities to explore their interests.
“If you got up early and did your work, you were done for the day by the time your friends are waiting for the bus to school – that left time for lots of fort-building and Legos,” said Scales of his childhood. “It was a very creative time growing up. … I was exploring a lot of drawing, engineering, tinkering and making things.”
Over time, those “tinkerings” evolved into structural explorations mixed with artistic innovations, and at the behest of a friend, he enrolled in the University of Kentucky College of Design’s (CoD) architecture program in 2003.
“The thing that appealed to me about architecture was the perfect balance of meeting real world needs through creative mechanisms,” Scales said.
His involvement with one of the CoD’s first ambassador programs allowed him to travel to places like Europe and Japan – travels that helped open his eyes not only to a new world of influences and design possibilities but also to the ways in which architecture can express and represent more than a physical structure.
“It began to show me how architecture can be a facilitator for culture, and that the visual language can be spoken through the architectural mechanisms,” he said of his early international travels.
Bringing that international influence back home while studying architecture at UK, Scales found his ideas generally trending toward the expression of the Bluegrass region’s unique culture. His senior year, he submitted a design proposal to Lexington’s Art in Motion project, which commissions local artists to create public artworks out of local bus shelters. His design, which used empty, green Ale-8-One soda bottles, was selected as the top entry for the pilot “ArtStop,” and the shelter was built on Versailles Road several months later.
For Scales, the project represented a deeper study of what “local culture” meant to him.
“It added on beyond the stereotypical horse or basketball that we sometimes think is all we are,” he said. “It began to push a conversation forward by using a local element that everyone identified with growing up, and taking something that was discarded, thrown in a trash bin and saying ‘let’s look at this in a different way.’”
Marrying elements of community and architecture with branding and even sustainability, the Ale-8 bottle bus stop project not only helped Scales cement where he wanted to go with the future of design, but also put his design work on the map internationally. Fresh out of college, he found himself fielding inquiries about that project from places as far as Hong Kong and South Africa, and ended up taking a commission to build a bus shelter following a similar model in Rhode Island. Eventually, he got a call from a firm asking him to come to Washington, D.C., to help design a new security facility for the Pentagon that would seamlessly blend with the building’s adjacent 9/11 memorial. The firm was impressed by his work, and he soon began assisting with security design in U.S. embassies and consulates around the world.
“It was fascinating spending time with all those different people, just learning about what everyone was doing in their certain pocket of the world,” said Scales.
His growing interest in different cultures would ultimately inform BroCoLoCo, the business he started in D.C. with his brother Jared in 2012. Existing at “the intersection of culture, community and commerce,” BroCoLoCo uses elements of architecture, urban design and branding to help businesses connect with their communities in innovative ways beyond traditional marketing. Commission work for the brothers, who moved back to Lexington soon after the company was formed, has ranged from painting large-scale, site-specific murals in the lobbies of apartment buildings and creative offices, to designing the interior of a high-end seafood restaurant. Using meticulously thought-out design, the projects tend to be powerful in scale and form, often inciting emotional connections that help companies relay their missions and values in ways not always possible through traditional advertising – or even art, in the conventional sense of the world.
“We are hoping to change the conversation on art and design in the business context,” Scales said. “Strategically crafted art that is site-specific and married to an environment architecturally really promotes the benefit of your business – it helps your business better connect with a community, which is who you are trying to connect with.”
Locally, the company has worked with the culinary venture Vinaigrette Salad Kitchen to create a lush sign for the restaurant incorporating Swedish reindeer moss. (Scales said it was designed to emanate the feeling of “walking through a forest.”) In 2015, they worked with the Lexington Legends to commemorate the baseball team’s 15th anniversary, creating a mural made up of thousands of miniature wooden baseball bats. The brothers were commissioned to paint a mural that hangs in the produce section of the Kroger on Euclid Avenue and are also responsible for a striking mural featuring dozens of origami birds on a brick building near the corner of North Limestone Street and Loudon Avenue. Most of their works, however, are found in other parts of the world, from Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles to London and Berlin.
While he enjoys the company’s international success, Scales says he would love to see more of BroCoLoco’s pieces stay local.
“Lexington’s greatest export is its talent, and we’d like to reverse that,” he said. “We’d like to see these pieces we are sending to other states and countries established here, truly adding to the design collective of our town.
“The whole point of BroCoLoco is to inspire other people to see the very plain world around them in a different light – to stop and look at the average item, like an Ale-8 bottle, and wonder if it could be something more,” he added. “We’d like to see pieces added here that push forward and add flavor to the answer of who we are as a culture.”
