Toronto Font Shots

These photographs of signs are an attempt to listen to the city in all
of her moods. Literally, they talk about the patterns of commerce,
transportation, population, and politics, the neighborhoods that rise
and fall, the immigrant communities that grow and move. Moving from
City Center to its outer boroughs, I take photos of text that I find
intriguing.

Sometimes the font is interesting because of its decay, or its
homemade crude charm, and sometimes it is interesting for its
commercial power, and the design element is an important aspect of
this project. I think that signage is the place where those two meet.
But it is not only aesthetic.

When Rem Koolhas' new library was opened in Seattle, information
workers had to put up Bristol board to show valuable information,
including location of washrooms, directions outside, and to the
checkouts. Koolhas' masterpiece was a failure because he didn't get
fonts. I think that the mark of a living city then, is that
understanding. Toronto gets it, organically flowing through its
citizens. (Think of it as that lurid and lovely two page spread of
neon in Scott Brown/Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas, except that is
now mostly a graveyard, and the fonts of Toronto are birds in a
thicket.)

The five here are intended to mark a bit of a history, and they are
100 years old, so it is not only a question of aesthetics or
information flow. Combining the history of a city with its aesthetic
qualities strikes me as a project of psycho-geographic desire that an
architectural bookstore might be intrigued by.

Installation Notes:
I want to paper the foyer with 4x7 drug store prints of signs,
providing a visual reference to the overwhelming number of signs and
signals that one get from living in a city on a daily basis. By making
them appear nicely in rows, there is also an attempt towards making a
visual taxonomy.