'Type The Sky'

I found this work by Lisa Rienermann on the web a couple of days ago when browsing through various sites and it immediately instilled in me some curiosity. What really appealed to me was the combination of where photography and typography intersect. When you think of these two disciplines being combined, i am fairly sure the large majority would think of letters being photographed, but Lisa Rienermann's perception was sightly different. For her project, 'Type the Sky', she didn’t take photos of letters, but rather she looked up (for weeks on end) and captured the letters formed by the spaces between buildings.

“It began with the Q “.
"I was in a courtyard in Barcelona, looked upward and saw houses, the blue sky and clouds. With the longer i looked, the area from the houses above formed the letter 'Q'." Once Lisa had found the letter 'Q' she thought to herself that she would be able to find the rest of the letters, given that they are relatively simple in their construction. Hence the project 'Type The Sky' was born. After weeks of hunting around and a lot of neck ache, she managed to find all the letters of the alphabet with just a very miniscule amount of help from Photoshop.

Once she had accumulated all the letters she decided to create a published book showing off all her work and findings. Although i haven't had the chance to look through the book myself, i can imagine that some of the images appear very abstract in their form and are a great inspiration for any typographer/designer.

All in all, a great way of interpreting letter forms so that not only do they become of typographical interest, but also of photographic and visual stimulus.

Hidden Typography, Guggenheim NY

As far as great architecture goes there is of course the Guggenheim in New York, one of the great artifacts of American architecture. In 2006 the museum was being renovated, the scaffolds were up, and paint and surface stucco was being removed. When this was being removed there was a little surprise found beneath the surface paint which had been hidden from us for a very long time. Some years ago, some poor sign installer went to put the first letter of the name of the museum up on the wall, and someone screamed, "No, you idiot! Lower! Much Lower! Get it down close to the edge. And a quarter-inch to the right." Given that the building is the Guggenheim Museum, and that the architect was Frank Lloyd Wright, this photographic detail becomes especially interesting.

Tying letterforms to the soffit edge — emphasizing the horizontal line — was in my opinion Wright's intention early on, as evident in his drawings. I could be wrong, but I don't think he ever floated text. Wright tended to use text in an "active" way to emphasize building lines and datums; or packed in a square panel, expressing a planning module. 
Guggenheim Museum, perspective drawing by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1951.
I'm not sure that it was Frank Lloyd Wright who art directed this correction. It could have happened years later. As they say, though, design is in the details. These are the kinds of little decisions, one at a time, hundreds cumulatively, that make a great building great.