EP. 03 – Fantasia Type

Fantasia Type is a research and type design duo founded in 2020 by Franziska Weitgruber and Michele Galluzzo.

Based between Milan and Laces, it is a meeting point not only geographically but also in terms of design approach: between Michele's background as a graphic designer and historical researcher and Franziska's vertical type design skills.

The name of the foundry suggests the genre of their productions — a tribute to Aldo Novarese’s definition of fantasia typefaces, typefaces ‘in which fantasy has soared beyond conventional forms’ disregarding classic construction rules and placing themselves in a category of their own.

The roots of the fonts designed by Fantasia lie in cultural references and the cross-cutting, never banal approach with which they are analysed. It is precisely this research method that gives flavour to the fonts published so far: Brass and Baustraße.

The first font is a tribute to the director of the same name, Tinto Brass, a pioneer of erotic cinema in Italy, distilling the iconography of his title cards, characterised by an extravagant and maximalist typographic style, into a completely new form.

Baustraße, the latest font released by Fantasia Type, also stems from a lateral interpretation of an even more significant phenomenon in 20th-century visual imagery: the Bauhaus school.

Starting from the universal alphabet designed by Herbert Bayer in the 1920s, the design of Baustraße moves away from being a simple revival to attempt to gather the legacy left by those letters in the following decades. It thus manages to encapsulate in its look not only the stylistic traits of Gropius’ school, but also an iconography metabolised and replicated by subsequent generations.

Effectively, Baustraße is a geometric typeface which integrates the use of contrast to give balance and personality. It does so by placing the thinnest strokes in the junctions that appeared most crowded and optically heavy in Bayer’s universal alphabet, such as those of the a, b and g, providing a less radical solution than the well-known ITC Bauhaus, designed by Benguiat and Caruso, in which the stroke was directly interrupted at those points.

Added to this are the numerous stylistic alternatives provided in the glyph set, which allow it to be more or less legible or decorative, depending on the application: from the more rounded capital letters to the modular S so dear to the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Thanks to these features, Baustraße successfully actualises the Bauhaus style through the aesthetic canons of contemporary type design, making it much more usable and less mannerist than many revivals that came before it.

It is not a simple art deco proof of concept, but a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts because, as the name itself suggests, it aims to showcase the Bauhaus not only for what it produced in the “haus” but also for what was produced in the “straße”.

“It’s essential to also consider how its spirit lived on in the decades following 1933 to understand how the original Bauhaus experience was later received, negotiated, hybridized, absorbed and mediated.”

This democratisation is also the subject of the central section of the Baustraße specimen published by Press Press, which draws a parallel between the reproduction of the Bauhaus style and that of the Cesca B32 chairs designed by Marcel Breuer.

Thirty-two unofficial replicas of the B32 found online are collected in a risograph printed thirty-twomo, ordered by descending price. In its irony, this sample book represents the value that Baustraße stands for: the idea of grassroots, almost clandestine design, which is certainly very close to Fantasia Type’s heart.