Ode to FUTURA

If you've been paying any attention at all to the layout of this blog (okay, that's about two of you, including me), you've hopefully noted that the typography has just changed. And if you are at all passionate about fonts (typefaces to the uninitiated) as I am, and if you appreciate rigor and minimalism (again as I do) then you are doubtless a member of the cult of FUTURA, the greatest of all Modern typefaces.

In the world of fonts, you have two main divisions: serif and san serif. Serifs are the fine, arching end elements that give traditional fonts much of their character.

The great serif fonts are named after their creators, Garamond (think traditional and bookish), Bodoni (think of any fashion rag or anything in them) and Caslon (think of adverts for any staggeringly expensive upscale English traditional whatever, though M. Caslon was French).

Then there are the san serifs, modern typefaces lacking such calligraphic embellishments, and standing head-and-shoulders above all other san serif fonts is FUTURA, the Zeus on the Mons Olympus of the font universe. (No, the name is not all-caps, but it simply looks so beautiful when presented so.)

FUTURA was created by the German typographer Paul Renner, inspired by the pure geometries of Bauhaus design. The original font, released by the Bauer Type Foundry in 1927, was supplemented by Renner in 1930, 1932 and again in 1933. The infamous Extra Bold, Madison Avenue's mainstay for a half-century and counting, was designed by Edwin Shaar and released in 1952.

FUTURA's cult status is due to the incisive clarity of Renner's design, based upon the simplicity of archetypal geometrical forms: the circle, square and triangle. Renner took extraordinary care in crafting each letter, and though the design seemingly is based on pure geometrical forms, even the capital "O" is slightly ovoid. Likewise, the stroke-weight is nearly uniformly even, and this when combined with the nearly pure geometry gives FUTURA its distinctive rigor, but again Renner took particular care to vary the thickness slightly from element to element to please the eye.

Finally, the lowercase letters have almost exaggeratedly tall ascenders, rising even above the line of the capitals, which makes them the most idiosyncratic element of FUTURA's design. Their uniqueness is redoubled by the nearly pure circularity of the c, d, e, g, o and p, an a priori design element which determined the unusual character of the lowercase letters, and which makes lowercase FUTURA text appear to be at least 2 points smaller than other fonts.

Here is a short video appreciation of FUTURA, well worth 2 minutes of your time:




FUTURA has from the outset, and today still maintains, an enormous success and a near-ubiquitous usage in all graphic media. After nearly a century, it remains among the most highly coveted fonts and is distributed on the web under license by Adobe's typekit.

As well it should, as it is pure genius.

Elegant Trash

Sometimes, all too rarely for most of us, you have an Eureka! flash of inspiration and a wonderful insight is handed you. One of our favorite watercolors, New York City Trash Basket (created in 2003 for our exhibition Central Park at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan) was one such moment and we wanted to share the image and the story behind it here—if only to prove that we are after all contemporary artists, despite occasional protestations to the contrary!

We created a number of life-sized elevational watercolors for the Central Park show (here is a link to the NY Times review), the largest among them being well over a yard long or high. The idea behind the show was to make an æsthetic departure from our detailed historical elevations: to render objects and architectural details in the park with our usual attention to realism while presenting them at the scale of contemporary art. (Below, a life-sized one-point perspective of a marble vase at the Mall in the gallery.)

We particularly sought subjects that would translate into graphic images with an immediate visual impact, and when we came across one of these iconic wire-mesh trash baskets while scouting the park—as former New Yorkers, it is as evocative of Manhattan as one of Proust's madeleines—we had one of those ahah! moments.

Measurements and photos were duly taken and back in Paris the drawing was plotted out and rendered and, despite the unanticipated scale of the effort those few words gloss over (it seems always to be the case), the results did not disappoint. (The original watercolor is over a yard high, so do imagine an image exactly as big as the real thing.)

For the gallery etiquette we wrote:

Overlooked and overflowing, bent and abused and often obscured by black plastic liners, the ubiquitous New York City trash basket is found throughout Central Park. The minimalist geometry of its design embodies the dictum that form follows function and strikes the eye particularly by what is absent. The simple wire skein defines the void it surrounds and generates elegant geometry reminiscent both of Paolo Uccello's famed Renaissance explorations of perspective and the Op Art movement. And certainly the Warholian subject also evokes Pop Art. It comes as a slight shock that such beauty harbors Manhattan's refuse.

More prosaically, the watercolor depicts the Standard Expanded Metal Waste Basket, model #MO5539500 black, designed in the early 1980s by Corcraft Products of the NY State Department of Corrections and manufactured by the female inmates of the Albion state prison. Later, vertical re-enforcement bars were added as the mesh had a tendency to squash over time from the baskets being tossed back in place from the backs of sanitation trucks (as New Yorkers with windows facing the street all know, this basket-toss is best done at dawn).

Once we'd hung it among the other watercolors in the gallery, the Trash Basket became the mascot of the exhibition and was purchased by the New-York Historical Society for their permanent collection. In 2009 it was included in their exhibition, Drawn by New York, and we were bowled over to find that it had been hung at the very end of the enfilade of galleries, the culmination point of six centuries of works on paper depicting New York.

Today, this trash basket has been almost entirely replaced by a new, uglier design that nonetheless better survives the rigors of hanging out day and night on NYC street corners. But we are happy to report that new examples this classic design are still to be found within the park itself, the last bastion of elegant trash.

The Measures of Man

Having lived well over a decade in the country that founded the metric system, or the SI (Système internationale d'unités), I do now think in terms of kilograms and litres and metres, but I can't say that I find the system more useful. Logical, Cartesian, yes obviously, but practical and intuitive, even elegant? Certainly not.

US Customary and English Imperial measures—the pound, the gallon, the yard—grew organically from usage and were refined with practicality foremost in mind, and their hallmark is units that are intuitively proportional: 16 ounces to the pound, four quarts to the gallon, twelve inches to the foot and three feet to the yard. The decimal-based metric system replaces all this with measures of technocratic precision, mathematical logic and an appeal to universality.

The English-speaking world has in part resisted this appeal to universality and often countries have retained their traditional weights and measures in parallel with their metric equivalents. Though Britain itself began conversion in 1995, certain defining measures remain unchanged: by law, beer can only be sold in pints and road signs can only record distance in miles. The metric system remains largely foreign in everyday use in the US, and as one who is constantly measuring and designing, I believe this to be a good thing, for the traditional foot is an extraordinarily powerful design tool, one whose innate proportions are unconsciously absorbed by native-born designers, enriching and supporting the process of creation.

This first struck me while designing at Robert A.M. Stern Architects. Residential interiors were always detailed with custom millwork, and I spent a fair amount of time drawing various moldings and profiles, sketching them at full scale. When it came time to hard-line them, a metric ruler offered little utility when spec'ing dimensions—6 millimetres and a bit; something that looks, after careful examination, to be 17 millimetres and a tad more—one quickly finds oneself adrift in datapoints of imprecise precision. But when I measured with a foot ruler, I was always struck by how effortlessly each reveal and return corresponded to the proportional divisions of the inch—1/4 inch, 3/8 inch, 1/2 inch, 1/8 inch, 3/4 inch, etc.—and unerringly so. (Below: just a commonplace millwork plan found on the net illustrating the inch at its effortless best.)

The same intuitively occurs when designing just about anything of human scale for human use, and really this is quite obvious to anyone using the inch/foot—it is a supremely elegant proportional system as much as it is a unit of measure, and therein lies its beauty, its utility and its genius.

Our forebears (going all the way back to the ancients themselves, whose geometry was proportionally based) all knew this, and when Renaissance architects began to publish elevational drawings of ancient architectural elements, their measures were usually given in fractions/proportions, not in the units of any particular system of measurement. Indeed, the standard unit of measurement of the columnar orders is a column's diameter at its base; the "standard" shaft of a Doric column is 8 diameters high; the Ionic, nine, and so on. (At top, Palladio's elevation of the Doric order, from his Four Books.)

In the Age of Reason, French surveyors made a grandiose attempt to accurately survey a meridian arc so as to precisely calculate the new metre (defined technically as one-ten millionth of the Earth's meridian along a quadrant and poetically by Condorcet as "for all people for all time") which was to replace the venerable toise (defined by edict of Charlemagne in 790 as the distance between the fingertips of a man's outstretched arms, and in practice roughly equal to the English fathom, or six feet). The surveyors ran into some difficult terrain, causing them to fudge mightily, and so the new metre came up short by 1/5 of a millimetre per metre when all calculations were tallied and decimal points placed. The metre had already become well established when this came to light and consequently the error was never corrected, and so it is that today the earth's circumference measures 40,007,863 metres, not 40,000,000.

So much for technocratic precision and mathematical logic.

In practice, designing with the metric system is often tedious and unsatisfying. A chore, frankly, like anything arbitrary and imposed. Good design is underpinned by rhythms, convergences, and harmonies, and the simple decimal divisions of a metric ruler demand that those elements be calculated and plotted out quite laboriously, ex nihilo. Imagine scrapping musical notation for herz impulses per second and you have a rather good approximation of the practicality of the metre as a compositional or design tool.

Which reminds me of a certain well-known and quite imperious German architect who was obsessed by the square and the grid and who made van der Rohe look like a free spirit (well this is not so unusual; German designers are often seduced by the square and the grid, just as many French designers are enamored by the poetry of the arc in tension, as a quick flip though any German or French design magazine will illustrate). Anyway, in his last years this architect received a prominent commission for a museum of contemporary art and based his entire design upon the square. Square windows, cubic rooms, grids everywhere—an orgy of order!

His obsession went so far that he designed square-sectioned stairs—rise over run equal, making a perfectly diagonal flight. Perfect order, and perfectly disastrous. He ignored all protestations of impracticality and even danger—for as (almost) any architect knows, you don't go about reimagining the proportions of stairs every Monday morning on a whim; there are well-defined standards that are employed unquestioningly because they have been optimized for the body's movement and refined from vast experience. Long story short, the building opened and the stairs were swiftly condemned before someone was actually killed trying to use them. It is hard to conceive such folly occurring in a mind conditioned by fractions and proportions, rather than the arbitrary tyranny of the decimal point.