From the housing unit to the typographic unit

How to approach typographic character design by determining a series of constructive processes derived from the methodologies of the construction professions?

Between 2015 and 2022, I exercised a gymnastics between two activities: construction (carpentry and carpentry) and graphic design. If this second activity did not allow me to meet my economic needs, it is nevertheless the discipline which was the most enriching for my main activity: construction. Over the years, after self-taught learning of manufacturing techniques, the use of machines and working methodologies, it appeared to me that the act of building is not so far from the act of designing a book. If we accept that the dimensions of a work are given at the beginning of the project to be carried out - by the terrain, the space, the room, the format - then, for a graphic designer as for a builder, the path is analogous . It’s all a matter of balance between margin, fullness, hairline, white, space, shadow and light. “It is certainly nothing calculable, nothing measurable but always something indeterminable, something located between things. The artistic dimension is expressed in the proportion of things, often even, in the proportion between things. It’s something immaterial, something spiritual.” It was on this idea that the project “Between typography and architecture” was born. It’s not about architecture or typography. It’s about what there is between architecture and typography. I considered the 18 months of research at Anrt as a break to look at and carry out a series of experiments in order to put my finger on this intuition which inspired me in my profession as an artisan builder. After eight years of approaching construction with the eye of a graphic designer, the months spent at Anrt were an opportunity to reverse the mechanisms and approach graphic design with the eye of a builder. My objective was to understand, through a back and forth game, the correlations between the two disciplines and to synthesize them into a transversal approach to approach character drawing. Similarly, all stages of this journey have been an opportunity to take a critical look at current norms and standards by redefining emancipatory rules and systems.

—

* Le pavillon allemand de Barcelone, Stan Neumann, 2009, Les films d’ici — Richard Copans / Arte France