Any building shaped like a letter of the alphabet intentionally, to reference the name or initials of the corporation or the team using that building. Very often in the form of skyscrapers.
A subtrope of Bizarrchitecture. Can often be related to Brought to You by the Letter "S".
Examples:
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Advertising
- An advert from Fiat,
near the end, shows a group of cream-colored buildings in a bouncing cityscape arranged to spell out the words "Safe Solid Beautiful".
Anime & Manga
- Dirty Pair:
- The Anime adaptation shows that the 3WA headquarters are a set of buildings that when viewed from above spell out "WWWA".
- An alternate design from the OVAs shows the headquarters as a single long building with an array of diagonal girders spelling out the acronym in huge letters across the front.
- The main building of UA in My Hero Academia consists of four towers with skybridges halfway up, so that from the side it looks like a letter H (for Hero, presumably).
Comic Books
- The headquarters of the Teen Titans, both in the animated series and eventually carried over into the comics, is shaped like a big capital T.
- Titan Tower was later parodied in the comic book Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! with the team's "Z-Building".
- In post-Crisis Superman, Lex Luthor's Lexcorp building is shaped like an 'L' if you look down on it. The top of the building slopes in a sharp diagonal to emphasize the 'L' shape.
- A numerical example; during the late 80s, the Fantastic Four had rebuilt their headquarters when the Baxter Building was destroyed by Doctor Doom. They renamed their building Four Freedoms Plaza, and the top stories were shaped like the numeral 4.
- In My Little Pony Annual 2014, the headquarters of the Power Ponies is shaped like two imbricated Ps.
- Occasionally, some structures in The Spirit may appear to be shaped into the word "SPIRIT".
- The Reboot Legion Of Superheroes had an HQ◊ that looked like the Legion L-symbol from above. (And if viewed from an angle.)
- In the Amalgam Universe X-Patrol, the Doom Patrol/X-Force amalgam (which also included a lot of Teen Titans elements), was based in the X-Building.
- ORPHANIMO!!: The reason Hari Vallalkozo wants the orphanage is to make room for his ultimate project; the V-building; the tallest building in the world, in the shape of a V. Eventually, a rival of his beats him to it with a Y-building, which Vallalkozo then plans to top with an H-building (courtesy of his evil right-hand man Hanz). Eventually, neither of his projects gets build. Also, when Vallalkozo is temporarily presumed dead, his ex-wife Ursula takes over his company and plans to build a U-building. This doesn't get past the blueprints stage either.
Films — Live-Action
- In Herbie Rides Again, Alonzo Hawk's proposed new building, Hawk Plaza, is shaped like the letter "H".
- Ready Player One: As part of the society's acute case of Sigil Spam, the main building for Innovative Online Industries follows an "IOI" shape.
- The OSS headquarters as seen in Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams is a huge glass building shaped like the letters "OSS".
Literature
- In the children's book Albert's Alphabet, a principal hires a carpenter goose to create a series of letters for the school's children to play on before the final bell. The rest of the book shows him racing from "A" to "Z".
- The head offices of the publishers who make the eponymous book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is shaped like a capital H, although why it's shaped like this and not some alien lettering is never explained, but could be down to that "long string of pretty meaningless coincidences" that are apparently a side effect of creating an Infinite Improbability Drive.
- There is also the head offices of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, which owing to unforeseen problems that caused the whole thing to partially sink into the ground, is left with the above-ground upper portions appearing to spell out "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig" in the local language.
- The buildings of Dictionopolis in The Phantom Tollbooth are shaped like letters, and King Azaz's castle is shaped like an enormous open book.
- IOI from Ready Player One has three of these, lined up to spell out their initials. This is true both in the real world and on OASIS.
- Exaggerated in the M Dimension, one of many alternate universes The Author of Gravity Falls: Journal 3 drifted through. In that reality, everything- including buildings, people, and household objects- was shaped like an M. The Author found his experience there extremely frustrating and baffling.
Live-Action TV
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: Gizmonic Institute, as seen in the intro and bumpers, is in the shape of a laid-flat "G".
- On NewsRadio, Jimmy James plans to construct two J-shaped towers in a bid to have his name on something that will live on after he's gone.
- Ultraman X: The Team XIO home base is shaped like a Giant X, fitting the series' naming conventions.
Puppet Shows
- Sesame Street has an animation, "We All Live in a Capital I".
We all live in a capital I, In the middle of the desert, In the center of the sky.
Radio
- The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy 1978 tells us the headquarters of the mighty Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is housed in a series of gargantual skyscrapers whose shapes were meant to spell out the Company logo Share And Enjoy! in mile-high letters. However, owing to one of those design and planning blunders the SCC is renowned for across the Galaxy, the ground underneath was geologically unstable and could not bear the weight. Therefore the mighty skyscrapers plunged into the ground in a localised earthquake and are buried for half their height. Those parts still visible from above ground now appear to read Go Stick Your Head In A Pig! in the local language.
Video Games
- In Cities: Skylines, the Colossal Order headquarters is shaped like the letters CO.
- The Glider PRO house "The Word Thing" has 100 rooms arranged into six buildings whose shapes spell out the word "GLIDER."
- The Legend of Zelda: In the Second Quest, the first five dungeons are modeled after letters in their map designs, spelling Z-E-L-D-A (one letter per dungeon) in a scrambled order (E-A-L-D-Z).
Western Animation
- In '90s cartoon The BOTS Master, big evil corporation RM Corp has two positively massive skyscrapers side-by-side in the shape of an R and an M.
- In The Simpsons episode "Homer the Vigilante", a criminal claims to have buried a fortune under a big letter T. The entire town then goes mad hunting for it, and several sight gags include T-shaped buildings such as the "Big T Burgers & Fries", the "Big T Building", and the "Big T Theatre" (with Ice-T appearing with Booker T. in concert).
- Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: In one Screwy Squirrel cartoon, Screwy escapes from an insane asylum whose buildings spell out NUTZ.
- The Lexcorp building in Krypto the Superdog is shaped like the letter L (guess what that stands for?).
- Team Go's headquarters from Kim Possible is shaped like a giant version of the word "GO".
- In the episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold "Emperor Joker", a near-omnipotent Joker reshapes some buildings in Gotham City to spell "Joker" during his Villain Song.
- Teen Titans (2003): The Titans Tower is in the shape of a giant capital T. When the HIVE Five took over the tower briefly, they were in the process of converting it into an even bigger H when the Titans took it back.
- A Super Chicken cartoon on George of the Jungle has a ridiculous visual gag where the narration has characters running into an alley and a vacant lot, showing them running into giant block letters on the street spelling out "ALLEY" and "VACANT LOT".
- WordWorld takes place in a world where everything is made out of its own word, and that also includes the houses the characters live in.
Real Life
- In India, the state's government plan to raise the building of Tamil University at Thanjavur in the form of the state's name in Tamil letters, when seen from above. 5 buildings, to spell out "Tamizh Nadu" on a 1,000-acre campus.
- The building of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Łódź in Poland is — appropriately enough — shaped like a giant section sign, although it is only visible from above◊.
