Micro meets macro…typography and architecture collide

Pritzker prize-winning architect Thom Mayne is one of my design heroes. He and his band of fellow architects and designers at Morphosis are really blurring the boundaries between architecture, art and… typography?

Quite a few years back, I came across a book about Morphosis, the architecture firm he co-founded. In the book were photos of scale models of houses that looked more like some avant garde sculpture you might hang on a wall. It was then that I could really see he was articulating a unique artistic expression within the field of architecture. I followed his career, along with those of some of his contemporaries like Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas and others via the pages of Blueprint and any other architecture mag I could get my hands on. I couldn’t get enough of those bad boys and girls of architecture.

One day about ten years ago, I saw a photo of one of Morphosis’ buildings that seemed to incorporate some typographic components in a scale and fashion I had never seen before. It wasn’t just signage, it was architecture that incorporated typography: witness the birth of the architect/graphic designer! (The project was University of Toronto’s Graduate Student Housing, 1997). Since then, I have seen this interplay of type and architecture resurface throughout many of his projects, many of which have been civic buildings.

Now, type and architecture have been together since before the days of even hieroglyphics, but never in such a bold, graphic way. If you appreciate the blurring of disciplines, you really owe it to yourself to discover some of Morphosis’ work http://www.morphosis.com/. The thing that fascinates me the most about this unexpected union of typography and architecture is, as a graphic designer, having spent twenty-some years learning about the subtleties of rhythm, proportion and construction of type, I feel it is a most unique cousin to architecture; it’s just that they are usually in very different scales–micro and macro.

It seems really cool to me to have these two disciplines that share so much collide in such a happy way. There is this great interplay of the vernacular of the building, along with the graphic communication of the typography that creates a strange sort-of synaesthesia for me. It’s truly inspirational…