A meditation

Sir Ian Athfield (1940 — 2015)

For me, architecture and typography share and explore similar concerns and territories. Each contributes to the complexity of the human condition. Both investigate principles of space, volume, shape, composition, light, dark, positive, negative, tone and pitch, context, meaning, materiality and, atmosphere. Both are constructed as a response to something, and both prompt a response: an opinion, emotion, a feeling, sense of place and being, metaphysical, physical.

Looking back over the years of encounters with Ath — and Clare, and the practice, and the extended family — I see a serendipitous sequence of projects, realised and unrealised, as is the nature of our worlds, a zigzag exchange of architecture and typography, where the two disciplines have come to know each other.

At an early stage, Ath encouraged me during a council meeting for the Wellington Writers Walk project to “go bigger” with works I thought already were large-scale. That day I felt the the door open wide.

One of fifteen concrete text sculptures (Denis Glover, an excerpt from Wellington Harbour is a Laundry), Wellington Writers Walk, 2002 / photograph: Bruce Connew

Years later, during a brief sojourn lodging on the hill, and in another exchange, this time about way-finding signage, I invited Athfield Architects to imagine their logo, a field of letters that I had designed in response to Ath wanting the focus to shift from him, exploding high in the air, falling about the steep hillside, then rearranged to give some sense of direction up the 300+ step climb to the practice. These ‘letter-crumbs’ are my response — and in a sense, a thank you, a small gesture — to a visionary idea of community, channeled through a cascade of buildings high above the city and harbour, aimed directly at the Antarctic.

The letter ‘a’ from A Hillside Intervention, Athfield Architects, 2011 / photograph: Catherine Griffiths

A post and floating sphere staked into the hillside mimics the letter ‘i’ in Verlag Extra Light; a brass ‘c’ is strung on a chain about the bough of a Ngaio tree; in torchlight a fallen ‘a’ projects itself as ‘g’; a light weight ‘h’ leans against the inside of a dusty glass window to the archives; a bold weight ‘l’ is a hole in the architecture mirroring the sky, until a figure approaches and fills the space.

Catherine Griffiths / April 2015