Design Commissions
Our Polite Society, based in Amsterdam and Stockholm, was founded 2008 by Jens Schildt and Matthias Kreutzer, who studied at, respectively, the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. They design typographic identities, books, magazines, posters, exhibitions, record covers and websites. The studio designed the graphic identity for the exhibition Prix de Rome.
Prix de Rome
This exhibition presented the work of the eight nominees for the Prix de Rome Architecture 2014. Eight architects, landscape architects and urban designers had been working on a fictional assignment for the area where Hoogstraat and Binnenrotte intersect in Rotterdam.
Our Polity Society: "The starting point for the exhibition design for Prix de Rome 2014 is the Roman Capitalis Monumentalis or Quadrata letter, which owes aspects of its shape to architectural applications. The letters were chiseled into stone, with serifs at the end of each stroke as a result. The construction of the letters follows basic geometric principles: they are drawn on a square matrix, that's why it's called Quadrata. We started drawing a font on a similar matrix, to see how a digital version of the Quadrata could look like. To emphasize the idea of the serifs, we followed the angle of the serifs all the way in the diagonals of the letters. This results in extremely wide letters, for example A, V and W. This is the font which was used for titling, to write PRIX DE ROME and the names of the participants of the exhibition.
Together with Bart Guldemond, we developed a system of panels which are either leaning against the wall, or are attached to a structure which is built around the walls. The panels display information about Prix de Rome, and archive material relating to the theme of the exhibition. The panel-structure is interrupted by 8 platforms where the architectural proposals were presented. Within this system, the title-lettering is fragmented by the format of the panels, creating a rhythm by varying the distance in between."