‘It had to work across all those different time periods.’ ‘We wanted the typeface to have enough personality to suggest that it was “Moscow”,’ says Mike Rawlinson, design planner and founding director of City ID. We wanted to design something that was rooted in the heritage of Moscow, yet was contemporary.’įor City ID, it was important that the bespoke typeface appeared neutral against the grandeur of the stations. Kubel says: ‘It was important to us that we weren’t a team that just came in and rolled out something modern and European. The practice commissioned A2-Type – the London studio founded by Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams (see Eye 67 and 71) – to design at least 40 pictograms and a bespoke typeface that included both Cyrillic and Latin characters. Their most celebrated project to date has been WalkNYC, a city-wide wayfinding system and ‘information brand’ that helps people navigate the streets and transit systems of New York. The Metro is just the first part of City ID’s commission to create a wayfinding system for the entire city.īased in Bristol, City ID specialises in design, information and wayfinding solutions for cities. There is a pleasing historical resonance in the choice of a British firm: consultants and engineers from London Transport played an important part in building the Metro in its early stages. In October 2013, City ID was appointed by Moscow Department of Transport to create a visual identity and wayfinding system for the Metro to improve the flow of human traffic through the stations. If you’ve ever wondered why each platform at Jungfernheide has a set of unused tracks, this is why.Several attempts have been made to address this problem, but none has come to fruition until now. The extension would have run from Alexanderplatz to Tegel, via Turmstraße, and would have featured cross-platform connections with the U7 at Jungfernheide. When the U7 superseded this line, the number five disappeared from West Berlin transit maps until reunification.Īnother Fun Fact: Despite the division of the city, the BVG had built a hypothetical extension of what is now the U5 into their long term plan. Endnotesįun Fact: Because the old E Line was located in East Berlin, the BVG originally gave the number Five to a spur running from Deutsche Oper to Richard-Wagner-Platz. If you don’t already, you should follow us at Twitter, for your daily dose of typographic goodness from Berlin. Previous posts have looked at S-Bahn Line S1 and Berlin’s Street Signs. The many faces of… is an occasional series on the Berlin Typography blog which examines how stylistic diversity may arise within standardised urban systems. More exterior typography from the southern extension. In the final years of the divided city, the U7 was the central artery of West Berlin. When it was finished, it was 32km in length and served some forty stations, including connections to all the other U-Bahn lines 2. Over the next eighteen years, the line was extended in both directions, a few new stations at a time. The U7 – or Linie 7 as it was then known – was officially born. This coincided with the separation of the branch from its parent line and the first stage of a new westward extension from Mehringdamm. In 1966, the BVG (the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe Gesellschaft, West Berlin’s transit authority) re-designated all the U-Bahn lines, replacing the old letters with a new system of numbers 1. It was not until the mid-1960s that it became a line in its own right. The first part of what would later become the U7 was initially constructed in the 1920s as a branch of the North-South Line (today’s U6) the branch, which ran from Hallesches Tor to Bergstraße (today’s Karl-Marx-Straße), opened in 1924 and was extended to Grenzallee in 1930. The construction of the U7 has been recounted in detail elsewhere – the English or German Wikipedia pages are a decent-enough place to start, although you can also trace the evolution of the U-Bahn through old network maps at this page – but it is worth providing a brief summary. Today a journey in either direction from Mehringdamm – the spiritual, if not quite the literal centre of the line – provides not only a wonderful forensic history of how the line itself came into being, but also a voyage into the heart of a city that, in some sense, no longer exists. Many of those stations, constructed at a time when the western half of the newly divided city was attempting to redefine its own urban identity, offered an extraordinary blank canvas for typographic invention. When the U7 was completed in 1984, it was West Berlin’s longest underground line and the one with the greatest number of stations.
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