Four * Four

Place and the sense we make of it are born of our experiences, histories, imaginations and stories related to particular spaces. It is an interpretive perspective on and an emotional reaction to, the environment. Space (socially mediated place) as (Mauk, 2003) states is essentially social and the social essentially spatial.

The specific place (site) which has informed the narrativity of Four * Four’s glyphs is undergoing a transformation. Built in 1960, the house has the vernacular of state housing (McKay, 2013) but was not built as part of the Governments State house building programme. It is typical of the period, reflecting the more modest trappings of life in 1960’s New Zealand. As new owners of this house, with new priorities, energies and family composition the space is being reshaped to match a perceived, optimal form. A form which is considered amenable to successful home building. Namely, the outside is drawn in, a invitation extended to light, indoor / outdoor flow and available storage needs to match the excesses of middle class consumption as dictated by home improvement magazines, renovation programmes and influencers. A different series of normative pressures shaped the form of the building at the time of its original construction. As time moves on, these norms shift, exerting new pressures on the perception of and ideal conceptions of, space.

In process, is the design of a new space, creating the environment most conducive to building a new sense of place, whilst at the same time, creating that same sense. This renovation process is ongoing, in piecemeal fashion, as financial and time resources allow. With each layer of the old that is stripped off, past histories are uncovered and incorporated into the new. These histories and their replacements, are incorporated into, as (Cross, 2001) describes, a narrative sense of place. Old builders notes on studs, slips of paper, dubious building techniques, dead rats, renovation ephemera and time spent with family are incorporated into the mythology of the site. The family identity is constructed through shared experiences, of both the making and the living in the made. A spirit of place (Steele, 1981) rises through this shared identity building which is intrinsically rooted in place.

A parlance rises from this place building. Place has a private terminology, a materiality born of the social syntax imbued in the space. As (Mauk, 2003) postulates, understanding how social space and the material conditions inherent within it, which generate language and give it meaning cannot be seen in isolation when considering notions of identity. As a participant in this place building I cannot escape it’s influence on me, nor can this place be free of my influence on it.

Four * Four is an attempt to phrase some of the visual dialect and family bonds generated out of this renovation project. To take the mythology of this place and distill it into an typographic artefact which will (hopefully) be used to create new meanings, new places by a wide, and ideally disparate audience.

In this process, the original maker histories will be lost, irrelevancies to whoever is using the typeface. Much like how the original builder notes were lost until the building was partly torn down. This is OK. Place building is iterative and mutable. As a designer building and releasing typefaces into the free font community, I have to be comfortable with histories, inspirations and rationales counting for little when a typeface is evaluated against others in long page list of other candidates. Here the evaluation is formal language based, does typeface ‘x’ connect with design idea ‘y’ or designer bias ‘z’. Rather, much as the house and environment Four * Four is drawn from, is itself built over it’s past. New usages of the typeface imbue it with new private and public contexts, and see it used in new spaces. Typefaces, like houses are shelters for the making of meaning.

Formal language

The vernacular narrativity of the letterforms which are based on standard 100*100mm H5 wooden house piles speaks to the process and materiality of DIY renovation construction. Formally the square is a useful shape both in construction and as a base shape for type glyphs. Where open and closed counters, bowls and negative space are needed, a simple 45° equilateral triangle is used either singly or combined into polygons as a punch to notch into the solid square shapes.

Each character shares the same cap & x-height. Ascenders and descenders in lowercase glyphs are 1/5th of the total 100mm height. The design method here is simple, ordered and proportional. Reflecting the materiality of the renovation process and the standardised forms of commercial construction timber.

Four * Four is offered in ‘Rough Sawn’ and ‘Dressed’ styles. Rough sawn keeps the hard edges of rough sawn timber whereas the dressed style apes dressed timber, with its soft edges and smoother profiles.

Four * Four supports the full Western European character set.

Bibliography

Cross, J. (2001). What is Sense of Place?. Presentation, 12th Headwaters Conference, Western State College.

OpenStreetMap contributors. (n.d.). OpenStreetMap. Retrieved from https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map= 17/-37.68886/176.14096

Mauk, J. (2003). Location, Location, Location: The “Real” (E)states of Being, Writing, and Thinking in Composition. College English, 65(4), 368-388. doi:10.2307/3594240

McKay, B. (2013). A fresh look at the state house. Architecture Now. Retrieved 22 March 2018, from http://architecturenow.co.nz/articles/a-fresh-look-at-the-state-house/

Schrader, B. (2007). State housing. New Zealand Geographic. Retrieved 21 March 2018, from https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/state-housing/