Universitetet Station, Stockholm Metro
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Stephen Coles and tagged with “garamond”. License: CC BY-NC-SA.
Every Tunnelbana (Stockholm subway) station is filled with art. It is sometimes called the longest gallery in the world. In the University station, tiles of Garamond letters form a sort of giant word search puzzle. It was one of my favorite stops. Can you spot the embarrassing typographical error? Other good pics of the Tunnelbana.
Source: www.flickr.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: www.flickr.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: www.flickr.com License: All Rights Reserved.
4 Comments on “Universitetet Station, Stockholm Metro”
The number “0” instead of a “O”.
sean: You win O points!
Finished in 1998, the work was designed by Belgian-born artist Françoise Schein. It pairs two themes: the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights and the travels of Swedish botanist Carl von Linné.
Beginning with Concorde, Paris in 1989, Schein has done several subway station wall designs around the world with a similar concept: tiles with type and images combine two topics – human rights and something more specific to the place.
“To generate the curiosity”, the artist explains, there are “no spaces between the words and no punctuation”.
Without having seen the Universitet station in person, I think this tactic has worked in achieving the word puzzle quality Stephen mentions. But, yes, how does replacing Os with zeros and ignoring Swedish diacritics (Å, Ä, Ö) make it any more intriguing?
Garamond in use at the Parvis de Saint-Gilles station in Brussels (1992). Themes: human rights and European borders.
Futura in use at Berlin Westhafen (2000). Presenting human rights as seen by German poet and writer Heinrich Heine, the “texts use typographical styles which were rejected by the Nazis”, according to Schein.
Times and Garamond in use at Luz metro station, São Paulo (2009–2018), dealing with human rights and the history of Brazil.
Outstanding, p-k! Thank you for the design credit and date, as well as for the additional examples.