Cultural consultancy Future City, specialist frabicators Millimetre, designer Harry Pearce from design firm Pentagram, and poet Alice Oswald have teamed up to produce a typographic installation that spans 160-meters along the street of London.
Commissioned for the soon-to-be-built residential area Kew Bridge West by property developers St James, the project was to ‘physically’ connect the Steam Museum and the Musical Museum.
Oswald created the poem, entitled ‘The Self-playing Instrument of Water’, which Pearce decided to embed its text into the path between the two museums.
As the location of the path was previously used by Grand Junction Waterworks Company that was built in 1838, Pearce looked for a typeface that was designed during that same period—which was the first ever slab serif typeface, Double Pica Antique.
Woven into the landscape as a ribbon of steel, the typographic installation—made by spraying molten copper words onto steel at high heat, to bind the metals together—transforms the path between the two museums into something that’s quite inspiring.
Visitors can read the poem as they travel along.
According to a statement from Future City, “There’s even a proverb concealed within its letters, arranged so as to be decipherable only to those who approach form the opposite direction. This means, of course, that the poem’s appearance is as essential to its success as its composition.”
[via Future City, images via Nick Turner and Damon Cleary]