I can’t imagine rock’n’roll starchitect Jean Nouvel uses mail boxes. I imagine everything either gets emailed or skyped, or it’s zipped over by courier on a sleek black BMW bike. Perhaps he’d use the need to pick something up as an excuse to get into the Ferrari and take it for a cruise along the Champs Élysées, stopping off en café on the way. But if he did use a mailbox, you imagine they’d be exactly as he has designed them for mailbox specialist DAD. ‘Transcript’ is a monolithic, modular, aluminium-faced wall of narrow horizontal slats, into which owners’ names can be inserted, in the manner of old-fashioned linotype typesetting. Names are composed on a name plate and inserted into runners on the front of the mailboxes quickly and simply.
‘The names are what should be seen first,’ says Nouvel. ‘I want people to put their names in the architecture so that each box door becomes a calling card.’ I’d like to question big man’s logic, but he’s the one with the flash car, and deep down, I just know that he’s right.