if you saw the channel 4 docu on antony gormley over the weekend with the very annoying filmmaker continuously asking inane questions then you’ll know all about the struggle to bring a big box of fog to the hayward (and also why he’s “never believed in these legs”).

gormley’s first major gallery exhibition opens this week, and includes ‘blind light’, the man-made fog-box. there are loads of talks set up throughout the three month duration including mr. gormley in conversation with will self, which my guts tell me is going to be hysterical. also worth a look is this short film of another place (100 gormleys on crosby beach)

g and me went to see the alvar aalto exhibition at the barbican today for a breath of fresh air and some inspiration. it’s finnish architect aalto through the eyes of japanese architect (and aalto devotee) shigeru ban, both men too clever by half.

art galleries at lunch time on a work day are populated by strange societies made up of students (in this case all japanese), old ladies, and men of indeterminable age in ill-fitting trousers.

of aalto, i found some of the exteriors a bit foreboding but his attention to detail on interiors, including bespoke lighting designs, showed unexpected warmth. i took photos of my favourite light before someone told me i wasn’t supposed to, otherwise there would be pictures too of door handles, cartoon-big wheels on hostess trolleys from mr aalto, and endless paper structures from mr ban.

i said nobody concentrates quite so hard as japanese students. g said he’d like to live in one of the little scale models. special.

it wasn’t until towards the end of his lecture last night that the audience was forced to accept that wim crouwel is 79 years old. 79? don’t talk daft. hadn’t we just looked at work that we’d grown up with and were surrounded by still? maybe this explains why there is nothing at all old man-ish about him. just as his work has hardly aged, neither has he.

he is funny too. even his repeated use of the word systematic in relation to his work became self-deferential. he told how his friends gave him the nickname ‘gridnik’, later becoming the name of one of his fonts. and it was the stories behind this obsessive relationship with design that caused the most amusement.

he described the terrible ache of falling in love with akzidenz grotesk in the 1950s. the typeface wasn’t then available in holland so he had to buy swiss newspapers and cut out the letters he needed to make posters. later, he fell for univers because the x-height is always the same whether bold, regular and so on. when asked if he would ever use serifs he laughed and admitted a love for bembo and garamont (but he only used them in books and never when communicating about contemporary subjects).

he is known of course for creating his own typefaces, many of them (including all of his personal favourites) are barely legible on first glance. and yet these are the ones that have been borrowed from and copied the most over the years, causing foundry to ask him to release them for sale. the fact that they do sell amazes him.

he still does almost everything by hand but declared that he would like to do it all again on a computer so that he could be more productive. he bought his first computer in 93 and plays with all the usual packages but says that his son (also a designer) has to check his work before it goes to the printer.

it was interesting to learn that architecture had been his primary influence and inspiration from his very first day at art school, adding that his teachers taught him nothing in comparison to the building the school was housed in.

but it wasn’t all about grids and structure and upping his productivity. the assembled full house audibly wilted when he said that a mouse is not a pencil, and when asked about colour he simply replied, ‘if i don’t know what to do, i use blue.’

geek note: the joy division cover actually spells ’substamce’ in wim’s new alphabet but designer brett wickens says this was an aesthetic choice and not some deliberate spelling mistake to catch out font fanciers.