Giant wooden outlines

Turn your head sideways and the individual letterforms should come into view.

Berlin’s Sophiensäle hosts many of the city’s more interesting theater and dance productions. The brick complex, which must be at least a century old, features a number of rooms off a central courtyard. Looking up from this surface, there is a large gap between two buildings. Well, there was a large gap between two buildings… since the beginning of June, a large sculptural interpretation of the theater’s logotype has filled the space.

At work on the construction.

Entitled Basic Bill, this installation was produced by Stefan Shankland, an artist from France. He was assisted by students from the TU Berlin’s Bühnenbild_Szenischer Raum master’s course (and a few other designers in its milieu). Anke worked as part of this group, so I got to see photos of each of the installation’s phases.

 

Left: a three-dimensional rendering of the concept. Right: the realization.

What I like about this installation is that it is a bunch of really big letters. I’m sure that there is some sort of deep concept behind them, and I can see that they are built up out of scap pieces from various theater productions, etc. But these are just big letters—and I love that. It’s nice to take a break from drawing little vector outlines in FontLab and look at a few real, physical letters, made up of outlines of their own, sized to several meters.

The installation should be up through at least the end of September 2008. The Sophiensäle is located near the Hackische Höfe, at Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin.