Would you fancy being in a library with typographic tree sculptures? What is that? Take a look:
Reading material in Crawley’s brand new library building is not restricted to the pages of the books on its shelves, thanks to a series of typographic tree sculptures created by artist Gordon Young and a team of collaborators that includes design studio Why Not Associates…The striking, cracked trees, 14 in all, are situated throughout the library building and are installed vertically, flush to the floor and ceiling to resemble supporting, structural pillars. Each tree is, in fact, a real oak trunk and displays carved passages of text from literature within the library, the typeface of each passage chosen carefully to suit the nature of the text – which is where Why Not Associates comes in.
“We worked with the selected passages of text, choosing typefaces and designing the layout,” says Why Not’s Andy Altmann of the studio’s role in the making of the Crawley Trees.The text to adorn the trees was chosen by the users of Crawley library, thanks to research done by Anna Sandberg. “She was another key collaborator and did all the workshops with the people [of Crawley] to point us in the right direction in terms of sourcing textual content,” says Young. “She also put hundreds of questionnaire postcards in books all over the library and we got hundreds of replies naming favourite books and passages and thoughts about what was good literature”
Also read about the difficulties they faced while creating these sculptures and see more pictures here.