Dordrecht Tunnel

In 2007, the city of Dordrecht asked artist / type designer René Knip and Dordrecht resident and poet Jan Eijkelboom to collaborate on a new tunnel. Eijkelboom (who died before the opening of the tunnel) wrote lines of poetry, Knip designed a monowidth typeface in four use-specific weights: Regular, Stencil, Bitmap and Tiles. It was released as Square in Knip’s typeface outlet Arktype. There was a bit of a row over the text on the wall, as the conservative Christian party in Dordrecht could not accept that one of the lines was a remix of their popular Christian hymns. Luckily, this has not prevented the project of being finished. After two years, tiles started falling off the wall. The project was hidden behind nets, until it was restored in 2014.

From the Arktype website:

The all-caps monospaced Square is constructed solely with horizontal and vertical strokes. All letters have perfectly square dimensions. Besides the regular version, Square comes in three additional variants, offering several solutions for producing the letters in different materials. The Stencil version allows the characters to be cut out, but it can also be used for purely aesthetic reasons. In the Bitmap version the rounded corners are replaced with little stairs. The Tiles version gives the ideal character-to-surface ratio for reproducing the letters on square tiles.