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Trained as a ballet dancer, painter and graphic designer, she was at the forefront of a movement that revolutionized design and architecture with ambitious graphics.
By Penelope Green
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, an ambitious graphic designer, landscape architect and artist who made waves in the 1960s with the oversized geometric architectural painting movement known as supergraphics, died Tuesday at her home in San Francisco. She is 95 years old.
His daughter Nellie King Solomon showed death.
In 1962, Stauffacher Solomon was the only woman to establish herself as a graphic designer in the Bay Area, working for clients such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (now SFMOMA). His taste was ambitious and fresh, occasionally with reds and black graphics with masses of white area and with clean-lined sans-serif Swiss letters: a striking sight at the time in San Francisco, where most of the letters were classical fonts such as Baskerville and Times Roman or, a little later, the looped hippie taste, trippy, which can be discovered on rock posters and album covers.
He had been trained in Basel, Switzerland, in the Swiss taste of graphic design, which had a modernist philosophy: confidence in the power of intelligent design to remake society for the better. But it was architecture that propelled Stauffacher Solomon onto the national stage.
In the early 1960s, an architect-turned-developer named Al Boeke envisioned a new network on a windswept cliff and an old sheep ranch, just hours north of San Francisco. Together with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr. , and Richard Whitaker, he planned a modernist utopia called the Sea Ranch, with unusual grounds and buildings molded through the wild landscape and deference to it.
Ms. Stauffacher Solomon, the project’s graphic designer, used the promotional fabrics and Sea Ranch logo, which she formed as if they were ram’s horns (a wide, curly Y), each of which surrounds a spiraling nautilus shell, a nod to either. ancient land, livestock life and the sea.
The architects had located the Sea Ranch Sports Club, adding a tennis court, swimming pool and conversion rooms, on berms they had created to protect it from the wind. The interior walls were made of unfinished plywood (cash was running out) and they entrusted the interior to Mrs. Stauffacher Solomon. With the help of a local sign painter, he spent 3 days creating massive spatial illusions: ambitious diagonals, circles, arrows, letters, and blocks of color in the shape of targets. “Make him happy, kid,” the businessman tells him.
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