How advertising columns helped people to ‘read’ a city’s identity

There is a famous night-time photo, taken in 1934 by Hungarian-born, Paris-based photographer Brassai, of the silhouette of a man looking at a colonne Morris — the familiar, cylindrical Parisian advertising column. It is a foggy night and the column appears as a beacon, a refuge.

This is a picture of a city defined by its street furniture in which text gives solace. We know where we are instantly. The architecture has disappeared, receded into the mist, and all that is left is the advertising column, the glow of the street lights, a sculpture in the distance and the sharp profile of a railing on the left. And, of course, the figure. It is, in its way, a photograph of urban existentialism — man, with words, on his own in the city.

Other cities have items of street furniture that define them — think of London’s red phone box or red pillar box or New York’s fire hydrants — but the colonne Morris is one of the most evocative, a beacon, a shelter, a public resource and an illuminated urban marker. But it is, surprisingly, not Parisian at all. The advertising column was invented by a German, Ernst Litfass, in 1854. Litfass was a printer outraged by the haphazard billposting that plastered and polluted the walls of German cities and he proposed the column as a centralisation of notices and posters.

Litfass’s design was ascetic and proto-modernist, a simple cylinder. His idea caught on, however, and the Litfass columns quickly became a ubiquitous presence on the streets of German cities. Paris followed in 1868, where another printer, Gabriel Morris, introduced a more elaborate French version of the column, capped with a rather exotic onion dome and a frilly frieze.

The more elaborate French cast-iron version owed its form not only to Litfass’s design but also to another familiar piece of Parisian street furniture, the pissoir. This too was a cylindrical or spiral-plan column of green-painted cast iron, often capped with a similarly exotic cupola. These pissoirs were inevitably plastered with handbills and posters, and contained within them the germs of their successors. The emergence in the 1980s of standalone automated WCs introduced a new variation on the theme — an expressive urban hybrid of advertising and body waste.

The appearance of advertising columns across continental Europe, from Barcelona to Budapest, coincided with a golden age of graphic design — a period in which artists of the calibre and fame of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard were commissioned to design posters for theatres and cabarets. But it also coincided with new ways of reading the city — literally — as it were.

In Brassai’s photo, a lone figure stands reading the posters on the colonne Morris, while the rest of the city fades into the fog. Other photos, by Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson, illustrate the centrality of the columns to the daily life of the city and, in artist Jean Béraud’s many depictions, the colonne Morris becomes an emblem of Paris, an object almost of veneration, with well-dressed citizens peering intently at the small print.

The columns became, like newspapers, concentrated nodes of culture through which the city communicated and defined its identity in an immediate, instantly responsive manner. They were a way of translating the city into text, something legible, a way of understanding the nightlife of the streets. With their striking lithographs and expressive fonts, they displayed a kind of street art, expressing the culture of the city and turning the street into a spectacle, a place to linger. They were free and democratic, accessible to all and, in their own manner, a place of refuge, an excuse to be in the street with no particular place to go.

The original German cover of Erich Kästner’s bestseller Emil and the Detectives (1929) shows the eponymous group of boys hiding behind a Litfass column, spying on their target. In countless spy films (including 1966’s The Quiller Memorandum) agents tailing suspects pretend to be reading notices on columns if their mark turns round. Here the column becomes a fragment of a city in which everything can be interpreted as a clue, can be read, as Sherlock Holmes before them had turned London into a series of maps and diagrams to be understood and interpreted for the solving of crimes.

For Marcel Proust, though, the columns became a vehicle of escape, into a fantasy world of smoky, lime-lit nightclubs and theatres. The advertising column also became a more literal means of escape — for Harry Lime, for instance, in Carol Reed’s stunning film The Third Man (1949). The shadowy, elusive Lime, uses a Litfass column as an escape route into Vienna’s sewers, its literal underworld. It happens again in Men in Black II (2002) when Agent Black runs into a Manhattan Morris column to escape rampaging aliens.

All kinds of myths arose about the contents of the columns — most famously that they contained spiral stairs that led to the Paris catacombs. The survival of the urban myth indicates a desire to see these columns as connected in some deeper way to the city, plugged in to the dreams and the subterranean subconscious of the city. In fact, if they contained anything at all, it was usually street-cleaning equipment — brooms and snow shovels. It is a let-down that doesn’t damage the myth.

All cities are, in their way, defined by street advertising (except Brazil’s São Paulo, which banned all ads a decade ago and seems to have done just fine), and each of us carry deep within us the neons, posters or signs we grew up with.

But these advertising columns represented something different because they regulated the medium, ordering the cacophony of bills and posters into a cylinder that evoked the rollers on which the posters themselves were printed. They represented a kind of concentrated urbanity, a moment to contemplate the variety of culture and the intensity of change as each day new texts were overlaid on to yesterday’s.

They still exist but the newer versions have become backlit boards for the latest generic global posters. They have gone from being an immediate expression of the city’s culture to being vehicles for the ubiquitous global brands to insinuate themselves further into every corner of our existence. There is nothing to read on them any more.

Perhaps the internet has replaced them, perhaps the smartphone has rendered them irrelevant, but in their mission to allow us to read the city, they flowered briefly as a machine for condensing the incomprehensible life of the city into a column.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic

Photographs: Bridgeman Images; Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty; 1949 Studiocanal Films Ltd/The Kobal Collection; Epic/Mary Evans Picture Library