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Frutiger: from a dot to the Paris airport
Balancing black and white, developing a universal language, and deconstructing what made Adrian Frutiger the designer’s designer
Around 1971, a group of uniquely and eccentrically talented individuals were invited by Paul Andreu, a dynamic architect and engineer, to brain-storm design ideas for an airport under construction. This airport, to be one of world’s largest at the time, was being built in a French town called Roissy, located on the outskirts of Paris (today, we know the airport as the Charles de Gaulle). Andreu’s invitees formed an architectural study group comprising interior architects, colour specialists, philosophers, a musician and a typographer. Wine was swilled. It can be assumed that black turtlenecks were worn and Gauloises smoked, too. Ideas such as laying a pasture for sheep to graze near the runway were tried on for size. There were philosophical musings about the nature of take-off and the separation from Mother Earth for the human consciousness. One idea that came out those evenings was a musical note titled “Indicatif Roissy”. It was composed by Bernard Parmegiani and was used (until it was retired in 2005) to denote the beginning of an announcement over the PA system.
The typographer attending those stimulating evenings of wine-fuelled philosophy in the style of French deconstruction was Adrian Frutiger. In 1928, Frutiger had been born in Unterseen (the Bern canton of Switzerland). At age sixteen, he apprenticed as a typesetter. He went on to built a huge reputation for himself. An essay on the wood-carved European letters landed him a job at while France’s Deberny and Peignot where he created several block-buster typefaces. For the Roissy airport, he had a special responsibility. Frutiger had been engaged to create the all-important, airport-wide signage system. It was going to be his job to ensure that users of the mega-facility would be able to transit in and out of the building as seamlessly as possible.
It was assumed that Frutiger would use his celebrity typeface Univers for this project. However, he decided to create a new typeface. Even by his brilliant standards, the signage system that was implemented for Roissy airport is considered a triumph of modern design. Later, Monotype…
