“Invading Spaces, Quest – Im Wandel Der Zeit” is a personal collection of essays, which I compiled in photographic, written, drawn and audio composed techniques. On countless expeditions undertaken on foot but also by bicycle, public transportation, car, boat or plane, I explore and document the immense diversity our cultures and man-made environments have to offer and how they change over time. How space is organized and designed and how written language comes across, tells tales about a specific location, its people and their era.
Metropolises have shown us that our creations are interventions that involuntarily affect everyone. The way we design and build is just another powerful form of human interaction. Just like the choice of a color or typeface conveys a certain message or underlying mood, so do the selection of building materials, an architectural layout, a city planning concept or an industrial design solution. After all we are what we create and only through the creative process can we define ourselves. Since the dawn of homo sapiens time we have left our marks to confirm we were here and perhaps even, to live forever in some sort or form.
Austrian born, 1972
Parsons School of Design, New York
Vienna, Austria 1992 – 1993
New York, United States 1994 – 2004
Berlin, Germany 2004 – 2022
Barcelona, Spain 2023 – current
OLEX – digital. branding. photography
Vorarlberg born Oliver Lins has been drawn to the Bauhaus movement early on. The result is this impressive photographic project about the special Bauhaus period, it’s architecture and symbols … to be continued.
Preserving enthralling typography. PAGE magazine interview, 2014
Photographing urban typography is a passion of Oliver Lins. Luckily he shares his findings with us via his agency blogs www.olex.org/news, www.olex.org/blog. We talked to the Berlin based creative to find out more about his motivations.
On your blog you show a whole lot of beautiful and inspiring typography from around the world. How did this come to be? The idea to capture typographical impressions from any location was in our heads since the nineties. In those days we were still all in New York and I started to think about collecting exciting typographical gems for a future book publication which would be closely related to our design agency OLEX. With the rise of the “new” media, we instead picked up that idea again in 2008 to form our first company blog.
Who is working on this project? We exclusively use material which we create ourselves. While my brothers initially contributed as well, the blog soon became my sole responsibility. Blessed and able to do extensive travels enabled me to collect large bodies of photographic work over the years.
Which cities can we look forward next? Keeping my eyes open anytime and anywhere turned out to be the ideal strategy. Wherever I travel and go I plan for enough exploration time. In the near future Paris, New York, Istanbul and Berlin and Vienna are on my radar.
