Urban Typography Transforms Texts into 3D Skylines

January 13, 2015, 10:40am

A paragraph about New York transforms into towering skyscrapers that represent the city they reference. A passage about Shanghai is similarly dotted with letters that turn into buildings that extend from the page. Text, simply put, gets sculptural in artist Hongtao Zhou’s piece, Textscape. Zhou, whose work covers “furniture design, sculptural installation and architecture” uses 3D printing to visualize the subject matter of different texts. In this way, text becomes a kind of architecture that references the woodblocks used in Chinese printing in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC. Zhou explains:

Videos by VICE

Textscape generates letter-sized 3D documents to visually profile the subject matters of the texts, such as cities, landscapes or figures. These documents make reading process interactive for general audience or blind people to read as knowledge as well as art. This series of work has text variations of braille, language characters, calligraphies and number systems to bridge the text and its visuality in architecture, landscape, portraits and abstract matters.