'Spolia Index' — Maia Gaffney-Hyde

‘Spolia Index’
Kreider + O’Leary
University College London
Purbeck Thornback ‘Frieze’ & reclaimed York stone paving, 2026

This commission started with a clear outline of how the piece was going to look, what sort of letterforms were wanted and their size. A Caslon style letterform, approximately 130-200mm high letters, a line of poetry written by Kreider + O’Leary to be carved across three walls, totalling 12m of carved stone.

My initial response to carving a typeface was to look back to the earliest examples of the letterforms, made to be printed with ink on paper, not a typeface designed for digital use. The earliest examples I found were on the 1734 Caslon specimen sheet.

I could find high quality versions of almost all the letters, but as the specimen sheet was in latin, some letters don’t occur as often, ‘g’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ weren’t as prominent and are blurry on my sample sheet of isolated letters.The book Designing type revivals by Olocco & Patanè was a useful reference on the treatment of printed type as a primary source.

When looking at the printed references two elements jumped out to me, the x-height of the letters and the variation in serifs. For the size of letters that were to be carved, 130-180mm, and the size of stone they were on, 400mm high, I decided to shortened slightly the x-height from that of the specimen sheet. The x-hight is perhaps most noticeable in the dot of the lower case ‘i’. Given the prominence of ascenders across the sentence I was to carve, I also lowered the text slightly down from the centre, to avoid the text looking squashed up towards the top of the stone.

When looking at the serifs across the letters on the specimens sheet, they have different styles and endings on letters where today we might make them unified. The top of the ‘l’ and the ‘d’, might be expected to be the same, the top serifs on the ‘u’ and ‘m’ are also slightly different, one more a slab serif, the other more pointed. I wanted to keep this individual character, whislt making the shapes more suitable for carving. In the first instance I gave the serifs a gentler transition, rather than a 90 degree corner a smooth curvature brings the upright into the serifs.

Other letters that required slightly more development were the ‘g’ and ‘ft’. In the specimen sheet there is the long ’s’ which forms a ligature to a ’t’, which creates a rather calligraphic sinuous ’t’. There was a temptation to include this ligature, as the sentence has two instances of ‘ft’, but after discussion with the clients, we agreed that it would be too confusing, if anyone viewing the text was familiar with the long ’s’, the text would read incorrectly.

The ‘g’ required the most alterations to make it fit into the adjusted x-hight, effectively condensing the tail, and not letting the bowl of the letter get too small. The sketches show the development of the letter.

In the process of refining the letterforms I referred back to words from the sample sheet to get a sense of how the letters ‘meshed’ together, to check I was achieving a similar cohesiveness with the letters I’d drawn.

The characteristics of individual letters have been retained, with some scaling of those features so that they do not look exaggerated when carved at scale. For example the rounded ends of the 'a', 'f', 'c', 'r' have been slightly reduced; and the curvature of the upper and lower parts of the 's' has been maintained. The thins have been thickened, while still maintaining a strong thick/thin contrast, which is a characteristic of Caslon.