Old & New

The decision not to show buildings on the cover was done in favor of illustrating a metaphor for the three chapters. A threepart typographic model reads ‘OLD’ and ‘NEW’ at once. It was developed following the three principles ‘addition’, ‘transformation’ and ‘conversion’: to achieve a subtle reference to architecture we converted two-dimensional typography into three-dimensional space. The result is a metaphor for the content which simultaneously reads the book’s title.

The selected fonts – relevant sans serif and korpus – were designed by binnenland and chosen because they conceptually corresponded to the topic of the book: new design concepts dealing with existing structures. Korpus was developed based on studies of mistakes in reproducing characters in the early twentieth century. Inaccuracies that emerged in part even at the metal casting and subsequent proofing stage were interpreted freely and combined as a basis for the newly formulated font characters.