the class-o-matic

Palindrome

This new sign for the V&A is wonderful. The museum commissioned

Troika to make a sign for the tunnel connecting the museum and South

Kensington tube station, and it’s bloody gorgeous.

It’s a kinetic sculpture of rotating parts of the museum’s logo (in itself

a wonderful thing, by Alan Fletcher in 1989) so that it reads at first from one side, and then fromthe other. I did wonder at first whether the V& A on Fletcher’s original logo were actually rotationally symmetric, and no, of course they aren’t, but for a sculpture like this the alteration to make them work like that isn’t at all noticeable.

Go and watch the video (or of course, visit the museum instead of baking yourself in Cuba or Miami) to see it in action. It’s so simple and yet so clever, whoever came up with the idea must have been quite pleased with themselves, and justifiably so.