It’s a classic counter-cultural exercise to observe the city and try to find new messages and ideas in its systems and forms. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur did it, the Situationists did it, and countless avant-garde artists followed suit until the activity became a relatively standard aspect of contemporary art and—suitably so—architecture. When artist Lisa Rienermann looked at the city, she saw … the alphabet (and some punctuation marks too). Rienermann has created a rather ingenious font composed entirely of photos of the sky cropped by the tops of city buildings. Click through for more.
It’s a classic counter-cultural exercise to observe the city and try to find new messages and ideas in its systems and forms. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur did it, the Situationists did it, and countless avant-garde artists followed suit until the activity became a relatively standard aspect of contemporary art and—suitably so—architecture. When artist Lisa Rienermann looked at the city, she saw … the alphabet (and some punctuation marks too). Rienermann has created a rather ingenious font composed entirely of photos of the sky cropped by the tops of city buildings. Click through for more.
Though no Helvetica, Reinermann’s “Type the Sky” typographic photo series has been quite popular, finding its way into ad campaigns for Mercedes and Renault and receiving an accolade from the Type Directors Club New York, according to Beautiful Decay. In each letter of the series, Rienermann captures a dreamy patch of cloud-streaked sky framed by unsuspecting architectural arrangements: a cul-de-sac of of apartments form a capital Q; a dramatic cornice angled like the Flatiron Building cuts out the legs of a capital K; mysterious silhouetted overhangs turn abstract shapes into lower case b’s and d’s. Rienermann’s photographs cast their architectural subjects mostly in shadow yet leave enough built features visible to give a distinctive sense of place in each letter. Thus from A to Z (and ? and !), “Type the Sky” transports viewers from one pocket of the city to another, though all under the same infinite blue sky.