‘Spolia Index’
Kreider + O’Leary
University College London
Purbeck Thornback ‘Frieze’ & reclaimed York stone paving, 2026
Photos © Richard Stonehouse
Kreider + O’Leary
University College London
Purbeck Thornback ‘Frieze’ & reclaimed York stone paving, 2026
Photos © Richard Stonehouse
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.
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’. The long ‘s’ is a double ‘s’, used commonly until the 19th century. 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 above 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.
I aimed to retain the characteristics of the individual letters but with some scaling of their 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.
The spacing of the letters was a determining factor for the lengths of the stones. I laid out and spaced the words, and retrospectively calculated the lengths the stones needed to be cut to by the quarry. It wouldn’t have been practical to have one word per stone, as this would have made some stones over a meter long, which then becomes challenging to move by just one person. The longest stones were 600mm, which were 25 kilos. There was a balance to be struck between arranging the words across the fewest number of stones, whilst not having too many small stones. The more stones there were, the more complicated and time consuming the fixing would be. This process did go through a few iterations as the nature of the fixing method was adjusted.
I aimed to arrange the stones so that each consecutive stone, and therefore the abutting edges would ideally be between words, and if that was not possible, between letters where only one part of the letter is closer to the edge, such as curved letters, ‘o’ and ‘u’ above, or where the ends of the serifs are the extremity of the letter, ‘i’ and ‘n’.
Given the scale of the letters I could arrange them so that they were within 10mm of the edge of a stone. On the drawings this looks very close, but in reality it was enough. Also this batch of Purbeck Thornback was quite hard and the dense consistency of shells in the stone meant there were no chips or areas ‘pinging’ out throughout the whole carving, transporting or fixing processes.
I won’t dwell too much on the fixing, which was a collaboration between Kreider + O’Leary, structural engineers Constant Structural Design Ltd and London Stone Conservation. My involvement was to interpret the engineers drawings which were part of an evolving discussion with all parties above mentioned, until a system that was both practical and sensible was landed on. As I was ordering the stone on behalf of Kreider + O’Leary I made sure that the placement of necessary cuts and drilled holes was understandable for the quarry, Lovell Stone, to act on.
Also as part of the piece are six ‘spolia’ stones, which I carved to Kreider + O’Leary drawings. The drawings evolved from their research into the history of the uses of the site that UCL now occupies. The stones themselves are salvaged pieces of the York Stone quad, originally in front of the Wilkins building. Being 200 year old stone they showed signs of their time underfoot and as part of a building infrastructure, remnants of pipes and the absorption of pollution can be seen across their surfaces.
The stones are named, ‘Ground’, ‘Foundation’, ‘Destruction I’, ‘Destruction II’, ‘Recovery’ and ‘Transformation’. In the order of the photos above, and also the order, left to right, that they are arranged in the space.
The permanent installation, part of the bicentenary celebrations for University College London, is located down the staircase off the central octagon in the Wilkins Building, Gower Street, London.