Making Space by Matrix (Pluto Press)
Front cover of Making Space.
Currently featuring in a retrospective exhibition in The Barbican, Matrix was a 1980s London-based feminist architects’ practice and – in their own words – “was one of the first worldwide to bring issues of gender centre-stage to the design of the built environment”.
Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment is about women’s relationship to buildings and to the spaces between them, and was published in 1985 by Pluto Press. The front cover uses ITC Avant Garde Gothic in the subtitle and the pull-quote on the red band. The back cover is also set in Avant Garde Gothic. The mock-up shown (below) used Avant Garde Gothic for more of the title, but the final art has used bold brush-stroke lettering.
A mock-up courtesy of Matrix Open Feminist Architecture Archive. Note in this mock-up all the text is typeset (in Avant Garde Gothic), unlike the final art, where the main title has been hand drawn.
What a beat-up back cover!
