As we move up to the third floor, we are heading towards the halls that approach typographic masonry in societal and historical context. Here our first stop, the Department of Order, reveals how the discipline of the typographic mason relates to the surrounding order of things. While masonry in the attempt to eternalise its production seems to strive for timelessness, it is in fact a representation of its own time. By arrangements according to contemporary ideals and dependency of people and techniques, designs are inevitably bound to temporal conditions and the order of things. The Department of Order is dedicated to the imaginations of these worldviews. These imaginations infiltrate graphic languages that, as a result, feed back into contemporary conceptions and representations of order.
The typographic mason needs not to take on a purely passive role. Namely, somewhere between the visualisations of cosmological order and the utopian and dystopian world views, reside the typographic mason’s occupation with the creation of these contemporary conceptualisations of order. Essentially, the relation between order and graphic language is one of mutual influence; one of dependency and determination. All the more reason to pursue new methods of image making and to dare contextualise our own contemporary designs. The Department of Order is about the typographic mason’s capacity to find new images, forms, words and styles that express worldviews and expedite cultural (ex-)changes.
