Alternative Histories: Bosshard, Tavor, van der Ploeg and Vihervaara on Bohdan Lachert

Bosshard, Tavor, van der Ploeg and Vihervaara, Bohdan Lachert’s sketch of partial facade for a post office, 2018. Acetate, acrylic, 250 × 120 × 350 mm.
Bohdan Lachert (1900–1987), facade lettering for post office, Stanislawów, 1937. Charcoal, pen and ink on trace, 370 × 265 mm. DMC 2596.3.

Bohdan Lachert’s 1937 sketch is a simple and elegant signage study for a post office in Stanislawów. Compared with Lachert’s more dynamic, constructivist compositions, this façade has a restrained, typographic character – the combination of the signage and ribbon windows is reminiscent of a bullet-point list.

For this model, we extended the logic of the sketch by translating a generic form letter into a monolithic façade for a post office tower. As the part becomes the whole, the building begins to conflate order and expression, billboard and duck, paper and architecture, post and office.

– Matthew van der Ploeg, Li Tavor, Ani Vihervaara and Alessandro Bosshard