Eye Magazine

The wooden floor of the Seattle Public Library’s Learning Center is carved with phrases in different languages and writing systems, a decorative touch that demonstrates one of the ways that lettering can be incorporated into the surfaces of a building. But while architectural lettering may often be decorative, it almost always starts from the intention of imparting information. As Nicolete Gray wrote in Lettering on Buildings, ‘both architecture and lettering have a primarily utilitarian function’, ¹ and architectural lettering, which covers everything from branding to signage, almost always starts with the purpose of giving information. The most obvious informational functions are labelling and wayfinding – ‘here’s what this is’ and ‘here’s where you are’ – though sometimes the true function is to proclaim credibility or power, or to affirm a belief.

The ‘speculative engineering’ guru Rich Gold spoke of bibliographic cultures and epigraphic cultures: cultures that read privately in books, and cultures that read on public surfaces such as buildings. We do both, but architectural lettering falls into the second category. Sometimes what we read on the walls of a building is not so much informational as inspirational: a motto or saying or exhortation, a poem or quotation displayed for public consideration. In the Lincoln Memorial in Washington dc, the inscriptions record the Civil War president’s Second Inaugural Address on one wall, and the Gettysburg Address on the facing wall. In a shopping mall in Yokohama, Japan, looming over an escalator between floors of shopping and restaurants, you’ll find a poem by Friedrich von Schiller, incised into black stone in Japanese, with the same text in German in white letters that stand out several centimetres from the wall.

A whole library to be read
The exterior of Rem Koolhaas’s new Central Library in Seattle (a joint project of Office for Metropolitan Architecture and lmn Architects) is a dramatic origami of metal mesh; the inside is nearly as dramatic, with a constant mixing of shape and scale in its spaces, though it does function as a real-world library, designed for the flow of real people. The scale of the lettering in its signage, however, makes you feel as though you are inside the navigational system.

This was intentional. Bruce Mau’s design office worked with Koolhaas’s oma on the signage, both during the original design competition and after oma had won the commission and done much of the work on the architectural design. Kevin Sugden, senior creative director at Bruce Mau Design, says the idea had been to ‘make the building legible’. The library itself was the embodiment of an idea – the centrality of shared knowledge, democratically available, at the root of civic culture.

The labelling could have been simple, discreet, unobtrusive. Instead, it is gigantic: the surfaces of desks and walls become part of the signage, rather than the other way around. Huge letters in Futura ExtraBold make it impossible to miss the fiction shelves, for instance, or the check-out desk.

To ensure that the library could continue to ‘publish itself’, they created a flexible template for additional signs – because they knew that there would be a need for additional signs, temporary information, things not anticipated that would be created by the library and its users long after the architects and designers had gone.

Lettering wraps around the Seattle library counters and runs up the sides of the brightly lit escalators; it shows up on the floors, most notably in the ‘Books Spiral’, a gradually sloping section of several floors that houses the stacks and displays their Dewey Decimal Classification numbering in movable floor panels next to the relevant shelves. (The panels can be adjusted to accommodate new acquisitions or rearrangements of the books on the shelves.) It is a bit like walking through the card catalogue.

The lettering style is continued in the less book-oriented floors, including the red and intestinal-pink hallways on a floor devoted to meeting rooms. On the main floor near the Fifth Avenue entrance, the gift shop has shelf units that slide together into a solid block, labelled ‘shop’ in large red letters, at night; the lettering breaks up when the shop opens and the shelves are pulled apart.

Pentagram’s Paula Scher has done similar work in several buildings in New York City. She uses letters on a large scale to turn buildings into readable entities. At the New 42nd Street Studios, expanses of colour and huge lettering on floors and walls identify what floor you are on and what you’ll find as you wander around the building. In Bloomberg’s new corporate headquarters, nine floors that Scher describes as an ‘environment of numbers’, gigantic and colourful numerals stand out within the overall grey and fix the locations of architectural elements (and of visitors to the building); in the public areas, media installations display live digital feeds from Bloomberg’s eponymous information service.

For the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (2000), across the Hudson in Newark, Scher took a dull institutional building and turned its outside surface into a typographic work of art. The whole building is written on, with words that express its purpose and what goes on inside.

Scher is well known in the city for her type-dense ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ posters for New York’s Public Theater, and her celebrated posters for Savion Glover’s Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk in the 1990s. ‘They were everywhere – they were on the subways, they were on rooftops, they were on the sides of buildings,’ she says. So it was a logical move to begin working directly with the buildings themselves. ‘As I started doing signage, they were either things put on buildings, cut into flat surfaces, or painted around things. This new iteration is sculptural.’

What the Romans taught us about branding
The words that appear on buildings are not necessarily typographic at all. As Alan Bartram pointed out more than 30 years ago, ² the letterforms developed for use as type on a printed page are not necessarily the ones most suited for use on the sides of buildings. Yet today, what was once in the hands of signpainters and stone carvers is most likely to be produced automatically from an electronic file using digital type. Even a display typeface whose design is based on large inscriptional letters, such as Carol Twombly’s Trajan, inspired by Trajan’s column in Rome, will look different when it is re-translated from digital form back into a physical pattern of machine-cut or cast lines on a solid surface.

That ancient Roman lettering was not there by chance. It was part of the branding of the Roman Empire. The Romans established cities and built monumental buildings wherever they went, to stamp their identity on the conquered lands. Part of that identity was the Latin language and the impressive inscriptions that embodied it, standing out over the forums and public spaces of each and every town. We borrow from that ‘branding language’ today, when we put a mock-classical inscription on a public building (or on a private building trying to look like a public one).

Vernacular formal
We sometimes fall back on that Roman tradition out of laziness. James Mosley has documented the very rich tradition of what he calls the ‘English letter’ in British architectural lettering, which is not dependent on Rome at all, but rather on the vernacular formal lettering of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. (‘Vernacular formal’ may sound odd, but it’s an accurate description.) He has also shown all too clearly how this tradition is missed or ignored by would-be preservationists; even the iconic house number on 10 Downing Street has been the victim of this failure of historical imagination.

When Grand Central Station in New York was renovated a few years ago, and new architectural lettering was created and incised into archways and other prominent spots within the terminal, the designer used a Garamond-ish style of Renaissance capitals, pleasant but a bit bland. They were clearly meant to look classical, but they looked typographic. The lettering does not complement the Beaux Arts architecture; it just aspires to be a sort of ‘good taste’ form of labelling. It functions adequately, but letters with more bite – such as the English letter that Mosley champions – would have functioned better. These letters, which should feel as if they are part of the building itself, instead feel a bit like a large plate-glass window that’s been subdivided by strips of plastic to give the illusion of an array of small panes. Functional, yes, but faux.

Almost every building has some element of signage, even if only on the toilet doors. To a typographer walking through a building, however, the signage can sometimes appear to be just an afterthought by an architect concerned only with the grand gesture. But that’s not so, according to Grant Canfield, a San Francisco architect specialising in large institutional buildings: ‘Most of us feel that architecture is everything associated with a building.’

Canfield points out that large exterior signage, in addition to its iconic function, may have an extremely practical purpose: on buildings he designed at a corporate campus for Bayer, in Berkeley, California, each has a prominently displayed number, with graphic symbols under the number, identifying what kind of hazardous materials might be inside. This lettering is designed so that emergency services can find the right building quickly, and be prepared for the hazards they may encounter. That’s about as immediately pragmatic as you can get.

In the usual architecture / lettering relationship, really big signs are reserved for the outside. ‘Interior signage is on a more personal scale,’ Canfield says. ‘It directs and informs the individual reader. Even if it’s branding signage – the individual store signs in a mall, for instance – the scale is always more intimate than the exterior signage.’ This is exactly the hierarchy that Koolhaas, Mau and Scher have upended and turned inside out. Or, perhaps more accurately, outside in.

How do you integrate lettering into architecture? It’s not just a matter of slapping some words onto a building surface. Like any other kind of lettering, architectural lettering needs to take into account where it will be seen from. The words need to be integral to the place where they’re found, and the materials used in the lettering ought to be related to the materials of the building itself (or stand out in contrast to it). If they are simply signs, they need to be positioned in the right place, where they will work for the people who actually walk through the building and whose gaze falls on that particular patch of wall.

As Massimo Vignelli described the signage system for New York subway stations in the 1960s: ‘The information was always to be given to the passenger at the point of decision, never before and never after.’ ³ We’ve all tried to navigate our way through a complicated building and found that at some point the logical progression has been broken, leaving us floundering in a crowd of purposeful strangers.

Gray’s nightmare
The words may not be on walls at all; they may be underfoot, like Why Not Associates’ Morecambe walkway (see Eye no. 45 vol. 12). The lettering might be carved into a façade or stone railing, or it might project into the sky from the top of the building; as Nicolete Gray demonstrated, this was being done as early as the seventeenth century. The lettering may be in several languages.

If the words identify a building by its name or its sponsor (for example the Pan Am Building ⁴ in New York, or Pacific Bell Park ⁵ in San Francisco), they may have to change eventually; if they are too tightly intertwined with the architecture, that might be impossible.

Not every kind of public lettering should shout out loud. ‘If all the lettering visible in our streets were immediately and compellingly legible,’ wrote Gray, ‘it would create a nightmare.’

Paula Scher describes cities as magazines: ‘There are sections that need to hang together (neighbourhoods) and feature stories that need to differentiate themselves from each other (public buildings).’

Some kinds of public lettering, even the most large-scale, should be unobtrusive; but even the smallest informational bits have to be there when you need them, have to appear before your eyes where you’re looking for them. Whether huge or tiny, the form of the letters ought to be appropriate to their setting – and immediately useful to the people who see them.

It’s clear that there are changes brewing in the way people see lettering in architecture. Just as architects constantly rethink the way buildings function and the ways all the pieces fit together, so do designers rethink how words and letters interact with the walls, ceilings, floors, and interior spaces of those buildings, and with the people who use them. There is a willingness now to upset the natural order of what’s architecture and what’s signage.

Letters, letters everywhere
As a practical matter, architects and graphic designers should be teaming up to create these new environments; after all, we have to live with the results on on a day-to-day basis, so we might as well use our best intelligence and skills in designing them. We need both a historical understanding of lettering in architecture and a forward-looking technical understanding of how we interact with words in the modern world. The increasing use of electronic lettering on and in buildings, as embedded yet constantly changing visual information, adds a new dimension to the question; so do new forms of portable information, both visual and aural. Yet the fundamental problems remain the same, along with the fundamental nature of the human beings who use whatever architects build. Only the solutions change.