Chorus — Five Cartoon Abstract Characters, Rotterdam

A developer in Rotterdam needed something for the forecourt of a new office building that would not read as a corporate logo and would not date. What they asked for, in the end, was a group of cartoon characters with no faces.

The brief

Five characters, no two the same height. No likenesses, no text, no uniforms. The design brief mentioned two viewing distances explicitly, and that is what made the piece interesting: from the eighth floor the group had to read as characters in conversation, and from the pavement it had to read as five separate blocks of colour.

Making a group out of five silhouettes

The answer was to keep each character extremely simple — oversized rounded head, two eyes, a body reduced to one rounded column — and to put all the variation into height, colour and lean angle. Each one tilts or leans slightly differently, so the group reads as a conversation rather than a row. Getting those lean angles right took longer than the figures themselves: too uniform and the group looked regimented, too varied and it stopped reading as a group at all.

The finish

Five flat colour fields — ochre, deep teal, off-white, burnt orange and slate blue — in automotive paint under a UV clear coat. The colours were specified to sit against the building’s grey cladding rather than against each other, which is the decision that stops the piece looking like a colour chart.

Installation

One continuous 6 m plinth poured in situ, with all five characters set in on the same day. Total install was two days. Because they are fibreglass over steel they could be lifted by hand off a small crane, so no road closure — on a city-centre site that is the difference between a one-week job and a two-month one.

What it cost

Five characters on a shared plinth sits at the top of the fibreglass band for this scale, $5,000–$15,000. This commission came in at $24,600 delivered and installed, sixteen weeks from 3D approval.