Tratex:
A Road Sign Alphabet In The Making

By Rikard Heber­ling and Jonas Wil­li­ams­son — In 2020, Lineto intro­duced Munken Sans, a new cor­por­ate typeface cre­ated for the paper man­u­fac­turer Arctic Paper. Designed by Laurenz Brun­ner and Selina Bernet, the typeface was inspired by Tratex, Sweden’s dis­tinct­ive road sign alpha­bet and a defin­ing fea­ture of the coun­try’s public space.

Ori­gin­ally designed in the 1960s and known for dec­ades as Gepos/Geneg, the alpha­bet was digit­ized in the early 2000s, renamed Tratex, and made freely avail­able online by the National Road Admin­is­tra­tion of Sweden. What had once exis­ted solely as tech­nical draw­ings for pro­fes­sional use by sign man­u­fac­tur­ers now became pub­licly access­ible as Post­Script and TrueType fonts. This enabled the let­ter­forms to be used far beyond their inten­ded pur­pose, in everything from books to cor­por­ate iden­tit­ies. Digit­iz­a­tion also altered how the alpha­bet’s his­tory was under­stood, trans­form­ing anonym­ous engin­eer­ing work into attrib­uted design, while obscur­ing aspects of its mater­ial real­ity, insti­tu­tional back­ground, and cul­tural history.

As part of devel­op­ing Munken Sans, we set out to recon­struct the frag­men­ted his­tory of this alpha­bet – work that cul­min­ated in the book Tratex: A road sign alpha­bet in the making (Lineto, 2025). Along­side a full repro­duc­tion of the ori­ginal 1966 tech­nical draw­ings of Gepos/Geneg, it includes an essay tra­cing the alpha­bet from its begin­nings to its digital life. What fol­lows is an abridged ver­sion of that essay.

In 1928, German typo­grapher Jan Tschich­old’s The new typo­graphy was pub­lished in Berlin. Writ­ten as a manual for typo­graph­ers, its cent­ral argu­ment was the need to dis­card con­ven­tions in print­ing that were no longer rel­ev­ant to indus­trial pro­duc­tion. New tech­no­logy and new ways of read­ing had made older let­ter­forms prob­lem­atic. Roman, italic, and black­let­ter typefaces, influ­enced by cal­li­graphic tra­di­tions, had evolved under tech­nical and social con­di­tions that had changed rad­ic­ally in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. Moreover, archaic let­ter­forms reflec­ted con­ser­vat­ive notions of national and cul­tural excep­tion­al­ism, which Tschich­old saw, against the back­ground of the Great War, in direct oppos­i­tion to demo­cracy and inter­na­tion­al­ism. The ideal typeface for modern soci­ety had to be as uni­ver­sal as pos­sible in order to facil­it­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion. Tschich­old saw this qual­ity in the let­ter­forms of the indus­trial age, espe­cially sans serif typefaces. How­ever, in 1928, a per­fect ver­sion of this let­ter­form was yet to be designed:

[...] all the attempts up to now to pro­duce a type for our time are merely ‘improve­ments’ on the pre­vi­ous sanserifs: they are all still too artistic, too arti­fi­cial, in the old sense, to fulfil what we need today. Per­son­ally I believe that no single designer can pro­duce the typeface we need, which must be free from all per­sonal char­ac­ter­ist­ics: it will be the work of a group, among whom I think there must be an engin­eer.¹

The engin­eer – or rather, engin­eers in the plural, in con­trast to the sin­gu­lar figure of the artist – played a pivotal role in shap­ing this new era. For Tschich­old, the ‘type for our time’ was indeed our type: it had to embody the spirit of col­lect­iv­ism. The rational approach of the engin­eer was to replace the fash­ion­able ‘artistic’ tend­en­cies and per­sonal idio­syn­crasies that per­meated con­tem­por­ary type design. Indi­vidual expres­sion had to be rejec­ted in favour of func­tion and objectiv­ity. Influ­enced by social­ism and the belief that new tech­no­logy could advance demo­crat­iz­a­tion, Tschich­old’s work was a reac­tion against the injustices of class soci­ety. He saw stand­ard­iz­a­tion and mass pro­duc­tion as means to achieve eco­nomic equality.

Con­ceived around 1930 by the gov­ern­ment agency respons­ible for roads, the first stand­ard­ized road sign alpha­bet in Sweden aligns with Tschich­old’s vision in that it was developed col­lect­ively by a group of engin­eers and res­ul­ted in a design that cannot be accused of being ‘too artistic’. On the con­trary, its form was primar­ily developed to fulfil the object­ive func­tion of a sign system for navigation.

As infra­struc­tures grew larger and more com­plex, and traffic speeds increased, the legib­il­ity of road signs became more cru­cial. The rise of inter­na­tional travel also neces­sit­ated signs with a more uni­ver­sal char­ac­ter. This led to sev­eral ini­ti­at­ives in the inter-war period aimed at inter­na­tional stand­ard­iz­a­tion of road signs. The Geneva Con­ven­tion con­cern­ing the Uni­fic­a­tion of Road Sig­nals, presen­ted by the League of Nations in 1931, was rat­i­fied by most European coun­tries by the end of the 1930s.² In Sweden, the first offi­cial reg­u­la­tions con­cern­ing the design of road signs were issued in 1931, intro­du­cing a set of signs to indic­ate dir­ec­tion and dis­tance to places, and an alpha­bet for place names.³ The fol­low­ing dec­ades would see many devel­op­ments, not only in the alpha­bet and pictorial signs, but also in the mater­i­als and meth­ods used in the pro­duc­tion of sign plates, along with an over­all increase in the number of signs and regulations.

Unlike text on a prin­ted page, text on a road sign must be designed to be under­stood while the reader is moving, view­ing it from dif­fer­ent angles in vary­ing light­ing, weather, and land­scape con­di­tions. As motor­iz­a­tion increased and traffic sys­tems grew more com­plex, these issues became more and more import­ant to the design­ers of road signs.

New reg­u­la­tions for Swedish road signs were already issued in 1937, slightly alter­ing the 1931 alpha­bet.⁴ During the 1940s, sign plates with the abil­ity to reflect vehicle lights became a con­cern to improve vis­ib­il­ity at night, and in 1951, reg­u­la­tions were intro­duced that required cer­tain warn­ing signs, unless extern­ally illu­min­ated at night, to be equipped with reflect­ors or made of reflect­ive mater­ial.⁵ By the mid-1950s, a reflect­ive coat­ing was gen­er­ally applied to all sign plates. The alpha­bet was also mod­i­fied again; some cap­it­als were widened and the two-storey ‘a’ was changed to a single-storey ‘ɑ’.⁶

The second half of the 1950s saw fur­ther devel­op­ments in terms of vis­ib­il­ity which led to new signs being offi­cially rat­i­fied in 1961. Let­ters and pictorial sym­bols were now to be moun­ted with reflect­ive mater­ial on a non-reflect­ive back­ground and, with the excep­tion of signs for private roads, text was to be set in cap­it­als only.⁷ The alpha­bet had also been revised one more time, with many let­ters com­pressed hori­zont­ally to save on mater­ial costs. For this reason, the 1961 alpha­bet was later inform­ally called ‘snålstilen’ – the stingy style.⁸

The offi­cial name, Modell 60, referred to the com­plete design of the road signs, includ­ing a grid system which assigned fixed pos­i­tions to text, road num­bers, and pictorial sym­bols. Groups of inform­a­tion were sep­ar­ated by bor­ders, and dimen­sions were derived from a table based on the number of let­ters required.⁹ This grid system allowed local author­ity employ­ees to easily draw up a con­struc­tion plan before pla­cing an order with the manufacturer.

At 5 in the morn­ing on Sunday, 3 Septem­ber 1967, Sweden changed from driv­ing on the left-hand side of the road to driv­ing on the right-hand side. Many of the traffic rules had to be updated and the road signs were reor­gan­ized accord­ing to the new way of driv­ing. As part of this pro­cess, the alpha­bet that would even­tu­ally become known as Gepos/Geneg, later Tratex, was developed. A set of tech­nical draw­ings was com­pleted in 1966, and a sample appeared in the revised road sign reg­u­la­tions of the same year.¹⁰

Gepos/Geneg was partly developed out of a need for lower­case let­ters that had not been designed for the Modell 60 ver­sion of the alpha­bet. This is reflec­ted in the name; ‘Ge’ is short for ‘gemener’, the Swedish word for lower­case let­ters (and ‘pos’/‘neg’ stands for pos­it­ive/neg­at­ive text).¹¹ The major­ity of text in signs was still to be set in cap­it­als only, but a number of spe­cial signs were hence­forth to fea­ture lower­case let­ters with cap­ital ini­tials: signs for private roads; an increas­ing number of smal­ler sup­ple­ment­ary plates; signs for public facil­it­ies such as post offices, hos­pit­als, phar­ma­cies, lib­rar­ies; and signs for bicycle and ped­es­trian traffic.

The inven­tion of new reflect­ive mater­i­als also neces­sit­ated a review of the over­all design and pro­duc­tion of road signs. In the Modell 60 sign plates, reflect­ive mater­ial was used only for the text and pictorial sym­bols, which were moun­ted on a non-reflect­ive back­ground. Because of this lim­ited reflectiv­ity, many signs required external illu­min­a­tion, which was costly.¹² With new and more afford­able reflect­ive mater­i­als avail­able, it made more sense to make signs fully reflect­ive. How­ever, when the Modell 60 alpha­bet – ori­gin­ally designed to be space-effi­cient in order to save on reflect­ive mater­ial – was tested on the new fully reflect­ive sign plates, a halo effect appeared around its thin strokes, making the let­ters dif­fi­cult to read at night. To main­tain good legib­il­ity, the new mater­ial required let­ters with increased stroke width. For this reason, Gepos/Geneg was even­tu­ally developed not only for the signs that used lower­case let­ters, but for all text in all signs, repla­cing the Modell 60 cap­it­als. It was imple­men­ted in two ver­sions: a thicker ver­sion for signs with reflect­ive back­grounds, primar­ily used for motor­ized traffic; and a thin­ner ver­sion for signs with non-reflect­ive back­grounds for slower-moving traffic such as ped­es­tri­ans and cyclists.

At the same time, increas­ing traffic speed and volume deman­ded more varied text sizes. The 1931 reg­u­la­tions had set the stand­ard height of a cap­ital letter at 105 mm, which was later increased to 120 mm in 1937. The first Gepos/Geneg tech­nical draw­ings from the 1960s included letter heights ran­ging from 60 to 170 mm, and even­tu­ally ten spe­cific sizes ran­ging from 22 to 400 mm were defined to meet the needs of both ped­es­tri­ans and motor­ists.¹³‌ Given that thicker and larger let­ters could poten­tially have led to larger signs and higher pro­duc­tion costs, and since mater­ial sav­ings remained a pri­or­ity, the Modell 60 layout system was also revised to optim­ize the sign dis­play area. A more flex­ible grid was developed to better accom­mod­ate text and pictorial sym­bols. After sev­eral exper­i­ments were con­duc­ted through­out the 1970s,¹⁴ the fully reflect­ive signs finally became man­dat­ory in 1978.¹⁵ The revised system, in the end called Modell 80, was imple­men­ted in the fol­low­ing years, with the pre­vi­ously used non-reflect­ive dark blue back­ground chan­ging to a highly reflect­ive light blue.

From 1944, the gov­ern­ing bodies respons­ible for public road signs in Sweden were the Depart­ment of Roads and, from 1958, the Depart­ment of Traffic. Both oper­ated under the author­ity of the Royal Board for Public Road and Water Struc­tures. Fol­low­ing the switch to right-hand traffic in 1967, the National Traffic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion was estab­lished as a new gov­ern­ment agency over­see­ing all road safety mat­ters, includ­ing the design of road signs.

The engin­eers work­ing for these gov­ern­ment agen­cies, design­ing alpha­bets for the public realm, recall Tschich­old’s vision of the 1920s. The sur­viv­ing tech­nical draw­ings attest to the involve­ment of sev­eral indi­vidu­als in the design pro­cess, as most of them bear at least two sig­na­tures.¹⁶ These mark­ings should not be con­fused with artists’ sig­na­tures, which indic­ate authen­ti­city and ori­gin­al­ity. Instead, they func­tioned as seals of approval and account­ab­il­ity; Axel Ber­g­lind, Gustav Ekberg, Bertil Frih, Karl-Gustaf Gust­afson, and Erik Lun­deberg are some of the employ­ees at the Roads and Traffic depart­ments in the 1950s and 1960s whose names appear on many of the draw­ings from those years. Although it is dif­fi­cult to determ­ine to what extent a par­tic­u­lar indi­vidual was involved in draw­ing the let­ters and pictorial signs, the engin­eers who signed the draw­ings were at least respons­ible as super­visors in the project.

Later on, it is mainly Gust­afson who has been cred­ited as the designer of most of the pictorial signs and of the Gepos/Geneg alpha­bet.¹⁷ Although he is often referred to as a ‘designer’ or ‘illus­trator’, he actu­ally worked as an engin­eer, or ‘byråingenjör’ in Swedish, which was his offi­cial job title through­out his career.¹⁸ Around 1936, at the age of 19, he had enrolled in an even­ing paint­ing course in his homet­own of Borås and sub­sequently had taken a pos­i­tion as a draughts­man in the city’s sur­vey­ing depart­ment. Aside from a cor­res­pond­ence course in engin­eer­ing, he had no formal higher edu­ca­tion and described him­self as an auto­di­dact.¹⁹ In 1948, Gust­afson began work­ing at the Depart­ment of Roads in Stock­holm and soon became involved in design­ing many of the new road signs intro­duced in the 1950s.

He was also engaged in redesign­ing the alpha­bet for the Modell 60 road signs, and he was respons­ible for devel­op­ing Gepos/Geneg. His ini­tials, ‘KGG’, appear on many sur­viv­ing draw­ings from the 1960s and 1970s, often along­side ‘CB’ – Chester Bern­sten – who began work­ing as an engin­eer at the National Traffic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion in 1973. After Gust­afson retired in 1978, Bern­sten and other col­leagues, par­tic­u­larly Roland Lithander, con­tin­ued devel­op­ing the design prin­ciples for Gepos/Geneg and the Modell 80 grid system. They col­lab­or­ated closely with the Admin­is­tra­tion’s internal draw­ing office, which con­sisted of a small team of draughts­men respons­ible for pro­du­cing tech­nical draw­ings and pro­to­types.²⁰

Inter­viewed in 1997 on the occa­sion of his 80th birth­day, Gust­afson stated that one of the advant­ages of his pro­fes­sion was its inde­pend­ence: ‘I was pretty much on my own with my work.’²¹ While Gust­afson was respons­ible for many of the draw­ings, much of his work was also based on pre­vi­ous designs of col­leagues at the vari­ous agen­cies. As the pictorial signs and let­ter­forms were repeatedly mod­i­fied, new designs drew on earlier ones in a prag­matic and unsen­ti­mental way. For example, what later became the char­ac­ter­istic M in the Gepos/Geneg alpha­bet had ori­gin­ally been designed in the mid-1950s as a new sign for passing places on single-lane roads (M stands for ‘mötesplats’, meet­ing place). A tech­nical draw­ing of this M, dated 1954, is signed by Ekberg and Berglind.

But even more gen­er­ally, the over­all design of Gepos/Geneg was based on the Modell 60 alpha­bet – with tech­nical draw­ings signed by Frih and Gust­afson – which in turn was based on the pre­vi­ous alpha­bet of 1951, which in turn was a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the alpha­bets of 1937 and 1931. In this respect, there is no single designer behind Gepos/Geneg, although it is fair to say that Gust­afson, in col­lab­or­a­tion with Bern­sten and other col­leagues, was respons­ible for com­plet­ing a long pro­cess span­ning sev­eral dec­ades of design­ing the alpha­bet for Swedish road signs.

The stand­ards developed between the 1960s and the 1980s are still largely in use today. This is not to say that there have not been attempts to revise Modell 80. Given that the cre­at­ors worked in a pro­fes­sion – engin­eer­ing – that had not tra­di­tion­ally been con­cerned with let­ter­forms and graphic sym­bols, Gepos/Geneg has at times been dis­missed by graphic design­ers as a ‘product of engin­eers’ that has ‘noth­ing to do with good typo­graphy’.²² In fact, Modell 80 was barely imple­men­ted before it became the sub­ject of dis­cus­sion, and already in 1985, the National Traffic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion took the ini­ti­at­ive to develop the ‘next gen­er­a­tion’ of road signs.²³ The agency hired a con­sult­ant, engin­eer Jan-Ola Sand­berg, who presen­ted a pre­lim­in­ary report in 1986 recom­mend­ing that the system of mostly upper­case text be replaced with one that gen­er­ally used lower­case let­ters with cap­ital ini­tials.²⁴ This would improve legib­il­ity, Sand­berg argued, and also be more space-effi­cient. He pro­posed to switch to a 1973 alpha­bet by graphic designer Bo Bern­dal – who happened to advise Sand­berg on the report – called Sispos/Sisneg. This alpha­bet had been intro­duced by the Swedish Insti­tute for Stand­ards and was inten­ded for ‘posters, signs, road signs etc.’, impli­citly appear­ing as a com­pet­itor to Gepos/Geneg.²⁵ Con­sid­er­ing fur­ther options, Sand­berg also recom­men­ded DIN Mit­tels­chrift, Hel­vetica, and Univers as useful models for devel­op­ing a new alpha­bet for Sweden’s road signs.

When the National Traffic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion ceased to exist in 1993, respons­ib­il­ity for road signs was trans­ferred to the National Road Admin­is­tra­tion. Sand­berg con­tin­ued the pro­ject, and in 1994 he presen­ted a new report, work­ing in col­lab­or­a­tion with graphic design­ers Arne Olovs­son and Leif Thollander. The need for a ‘com­plete over­haul’ of the cur­rent system was declared, citing increased traffic and the neces­sity of enhan­cing legib­il­ity.²⁶ The Gepos/Geneg alpha­bet was cri­ti­cized for not being ‘rooted in the 500-year-old tra­di­tion of West­ern let­ter­ing and typo­graphy’, as the let­ters were based on geo­met­ric shapes – arcs and straight lines of uni­form width, con­struc­ted on a grid using a ruler and com­pass.²⁷ For the same reason, DIN Mit­tels­chrift and Hel­vetica were now rejec­ted, in con­trast to the find­ings of the 1986 report. Instead, the con­sult­ants recom­men­ded the alpha­bet used in Brit­ish road signs, known as Trans­port, as the model for a new alpha­bet, which they regarded as being in close affin­ity with clas­sical Roman let­ter­forms, highly legible, and ‘express­ive’ com­pared to geo­met­ric sans serifs.²⁸ Based on their new find­ings, the con­sult­ants drew up a pro­posal for a new alpha­bet for Swedish road signs.

In 1997, the National Road and Trans­port Research Insti­tute organ­ized extens­ive tests which com­pared the alpha­bet by Sand­berg, Olovs­son, and Thollander with five com­pet­it­ors: Sispos/Sisneg, Trans­port, Dansk Vejtavleskrift (Den­mark’s road sign alpha­bet, a mod­i­fied ver­sion of Trans­port), and two ver­sions of Gepos/Geneg – one in lower­case let­ters with cap­ital ini­tials and one in cap­it­als only. Con­cern­ing legib­il­ity, the tests ended in a draw between the con­sult­ants’ pro­posal and the cap­it­als-only ver­sion of Gepos/Geneg; Sispos/Sisneg came in last.²⁹ While the pro­posed let­ters by Sand­berg and his col­leagues would use less space than Gepos/Geneg, redu­cing mater­ial costs in the long run, the poten­tial bene­fits of a com­plete over­haul of the exist­ing system now had to be weighed against the eco­nomic costs and labour involved in such a change. Gepos/Geneg had been in use for more than two dec­ades, and the tests failed to clearly demon­strate that a new alpha­bet would offer sig­ni­fic­ant advant­ages in terms of cost-effi­ciency and road safety. Although the test method can be ques­tioned in that famili­ar­ity of users with the exist­ing system might have favoured Gepos/Geneg, no addi­tional exper­i­ments were under­taken. The devel­op­ment of a new alpha­bet came to a stand­still.³⁰

The con­ver­sion of Gepos/Geneg to a digital typeface a few years later was driven by chan­ging pro­duc­tion meth­ods. A common method of man­u­fac­tur­ing the sign plates had long involved mech­an­ic­ally cut­ting the let­ters from the reflect­ive mater­ial using dies, then mount­ing them with heat onto the back­ground sur­face. Some man­u­fac­tur­ers used sten­cils to ensure con­sist­ent spa­cing and align­ment of the let­ters. Before mount­ing, the sten­cils were arranged side by side on the back­ground mater­ial, and each letter was posi­tioned within its respect­ive sten­cil.³¹ By 1987, Sand­berg noted that sign man­u­fac­tur­ers were increas­ingly work­ing with com­puters.³² Around the same time, the National Traffic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion con­ver­ted the draw­ings of Gepos/Geneg into digital CAD files to facil­it­ate the die-cut­ting pro­cess. Soon it was also pos­sible to type text dir­ectly into soft­ware, so that signs could be digit­ally com­posed and prin­ted as a single unit. How­ever, the long pro­cess of devel­op­ing and test­ing Sand­berg’s pro­posal for a new alpha­bet may explain why digit­iz­a­tion was not pur­sued any fur­ther during these years. Only in late 2001, while still work­ing at the Admin­is­tra­tion, Bern­sten com­mis­sioned graphic designer Karl-Erik Wångstedt to con­vert the CAD files into Post­Script and TrueType fonts using Mac­ro­media Fon­to­grapher. The CAD files had con­tained rect­angles around each letter to indic­ate the dis­tance to other let­ters, and these meas­ure­ments were trans­ferred to the font files. No changes were made to the letter spa­cing. Wångstedt acknow­ledged Bern­sten and Gust­afson in the metadata of the new font files, based on Bern­sten’s account of the pro­ject. The new name, Tratex, was Bern­sten’s idea: simply an abbre­vi­ation of ‘trafik­text’.³³

When the National Road Admin­is­tra­tion made Tratex pub­licly avail­able in 2002, writ­ing the his­tory of the alpha­bet was not a con­cern. Pub­lish­ing the fonts on the Admin­is­tra­tion’s web­site was primar­ily a way of dis­trib­ut­ing them to sign man­u­fac­tur­ers. How­ever, as Tratex became access­ible to anyone with a com­puter, the alpha­bet began to spread beyond its ori­ginal pur­pose, indir­ectly con­trib­ut­ing to how the his­tory of Gepos/Geneg was per­ceived. Wångstedt’s ini­ti­at­ive to credit Gust­afson and Bern­sten ensured their names would be linked to the alpha­bet in the future, yet sev­eral other aspects of Gepos/Geneg were lost in the pro­cess of digit­iz­a­tion and online dis­tri­bu­tion. For instance, the thin ver­sion of the alpha­bet was not included and, as a con­sequence, has largely remained over­looked in his­tor­ical accounts. The same can be said of the col­lect­ive work­ing envir­on­ment and the mater­ial con­di­tions that shaped the design pro­cess: a his­tory for which there is no room in the metadata of com­puter fonts.

The con­ver­sion of the Gepos/Geneg draw­ings into digital formats was part of the broader digital trans­form­a­tion of soci­ety, which became increas­ingly appar­ent in the 1990s. Tratex was the National Road Admin­is­tra­tion’s response to the emer­ging tech­no­lo­gical stand­ards of the period. Sim­ul­tan­eously, com­pu­ter­iz­a­tion cre­ated new demands for visual com­mu­nic­a­tion and cor­por­ate brand­ing, with digital typo­graphy play­ing a cent­ral role. Since then, the market for digital typeface design has grown sig­ni­fic­antly and sev­eral other digital rendi­tions of Gepos/Geneg have been pro­duced. These fonts have been used in advert­ising, cor­por­ate iden­tit­ies, pub­lic­a­tions, and so on. Inter­est­ingly, the new rendi­tions were often copy­righted and sold by indi­vidual design­ers or design com­pan­ies, some­times with a ref­er­ence to Gust­afson as a his­tor­ical curi­os­ity. In other words, as the ori­ginal pur­pose of serving a common infra­struc­ture has expan­ded to include other uses, the Gepos/Geneg alpha­bet has become as much a symbol of private prop­erty and indi­vidu­al­ity as it has remained a tool designed to aid ori­ent­a­tion in public spaces. For sure, a common alpha­bet for the public realm may not be as import­ant as it once was, given the privat­iz­a­tion of public ser­vices and the chan­ging tech­no­lo­gies that determ­ine how people nav­ig­ate phys­ical space. Yet regard­less of how the Gepos/Geneg alpha­bet will be used in the future, it will always remain a monu­ment to the soci­ety envi­sioned by Tschich­old and others: a soci­ety shaped by engineers.