For many years, the visible language of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (1928–2024) has formed how we transfer by way of buildings, learn house, and perceive place – usually with out realising it. Her monumental letters painted instantly onto partitions, daring symbols embedded in structure, and radical use of color helped outline a brand new relationship between graphics and house.
Working on the intersection of artwork, structure and design, Stauffacher Solomon pioneered what got here to be often known as supergraphics: a mind-set about house as one thing to be learn as a lot as it’s seen. As an exhibition of her work opens at Anthony Meier in California (on view till 27 February 2026), Wallpaper* seems again at her outstanding work.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon formation: Swiss modernism
(Picture credit score: Images: Chris Grunder. Courtesy the Artist)
Born on 5 December, 1928, in San Francisco, Barbara ‘Bobbie’ Stauffacher Solomon educated first as a ballet dancer earlier than incomes a scholarship to check portray and sculpture at San Francisco Artwork Institute. At 20, she married experimental filmmaker Frank Stauffacher, who died out of the blue from a mind tumour six years later. Left with no cash and a younger daughter to help, she travelled together with her mom and three-year-old daughter to Basel in 1956 to coach as a graphic designer below the tutelage of Swiss graphic designer Armin Hofmann. Right here, the one American pupil, she was launched to the rules of Swiss modernism: readability, discount and the disciplined use of typography.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, her daughter Chloe, artist Luchita Hurtado and son Matt Mullican, March 1960, St Moritz
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the Artist & von Bartha)
On returning to California and opening her studio in 1962, she utilized this strategy to a really completely different visible panorama. At a time when San Francisco remained dominated by conventional lettering and ornamental graphics, Stauffacher Solomon launched a daring new typographic language – together with using Helvetica – that prioritised perform, legibility, construction and reality. Slightly than reproducing Swiss modernism, she tailored its logic to architectural house, laying the groundwork for the work that might comply with.
The Sea Ranch
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s supergraphics within the males’s locker room of the 1966 Moonraker Athletic Heart on the Sea Ranch
(Picture credit score: Leslie Williamson)
Within the US, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon met panorama architect Lawrence Halprin, who supplied her an workplace and entrusted her with all of his graphic work. Via that relationship got here her first main fee: the signage and environmental graphics for The Sea Ranch, the novel Northern California growth realised in 1964 by a collective of younger architects and designers together with Halprin.
When the challenge ran over price range, she was requested to plan a low-cost signage system. Her answer was swift and direct: outsized letters and symbols painted straight onto partitions and buildings in pink, ultramarine blue, black and white.
Sea Ranch brochure designed by Solomon in 1965 for which she additionally designed the distinctive ram’s head/waves brand
(Picture credit score: © Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Assortment SFMOMA, Reward of The Sea Ranch Archives)
The end result was a brand new graphic language – later termed supergraphics – through which scale, orientation and legibility took priority over ornament. Phrases turned spatial instruments; color was used to information motion and mark thresholds. Executed in a matter of days, the work rapidly drew nationwide consideration, showing on the duvet of Progressive Structure journal and setting off a wave of imitation.
‘No one thinks of me as a mommy. However that’s why I [pursued graphic design] – I wanted to earn money, in any other case I might have been a painter,’ she instructed Wallpaper* in 2023. ‘That’s what I used to be educated for within the first place. And that’s why after I was confronted with partitions at locations like Sea Ranch, I assumed “High-quality, certain, make issues large – something is feasible”.’
From floor to system
Scanlan’s Month-to-month journal, quantity 1, No 2, April 1970
(Picture credit score: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon)
Following The Sea Ranch, Stauffacher Solomon’s apply expanded, with initiatives in San Francisco, New York and Europe that continued to check how graphic programs may function at architectural and concrete scale. But by the early Nineteen Seventies, she had begun to tug away from graphic design as a business occupation.
A short flip as artwork director of Scanlan’s Month-to-month in 1970 – a short-lived political journal that referred to as for the impeachment of President Nixon – mirrored her resistance to fastened classes. The next 12 months, she had a daughter, Nellie King Solomon, now an artist in her personal proper. She returned to the College of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1977 with a bachelor’s diploma in historical past and in 1981 with a grasp’s diploma in structure. She redirected her consideration in direction of panorama and public house. Working more and more as a panorama architect – usually alongside Dan Solomon, whom she married in 1969 andf later divorced in 1990 – her focus shifted from floor to system.
Inexperienced structure
Alcatraz from Crissy Subject, 1993. Coloured pencil, graphite, ink, vellum
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Property, Anthony Meier, and von Bartha)
Operating parallel to her large-scale architectural interventions was a quieter however no much less rigorous physique of labor centered on panorama, order and management. For Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, the backyard, town grid and the picture of paradise had been carefully entwined concepts. Throughout a long time of drawings and work, she returned repeatedly to the inexperienced rectangle: a pared-back image of cultivated nature, framed, contained and imposed upon the land.
She articulated these concepts most clearly in her 1989 e-book ‘Inexperienced Structure and the Agrarian Backyard’, developed from her College of California, Berkeley thesis. In it, she described California as a constructed Eden – the place ‘yellow deserts had been watered, and the inexperienced gardens grew,’ and the place San Francisco’s grid carved managed inexperienced areas into pure hills and sand.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Untitled (French Formal Backyard Variation). Coloured pencil and graphite on paper
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Property, Anthony Meier, and von Bartha)
In her drawings, metropolis plans, fields and imagined terrains collapse right into a single visible language that sits between panorama, structure and abstraction.
Later life and legacy
Set up view of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s 2019 exhibition ‘Chill out into the Invisible’ at LAXART
(Picture credit score: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon/ LAXART)
Throughout greater than eight a long time of labor, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon constructed a profession that remodeled the best way we see panorama, structure, and artwork. Her initiatives had been broadly realised, revealed and emulated, and her concepts travelled far past the contexts through which they first appeared.
But her story additionally traces a broader sample of under-recognition. Working largely alone in a male-dominated area, she resisted the constructions – studios, actions, establishments – that always consolidate authorship and legacy. Her work was absorbed rapidly into the mainstream, its concepts normalised and indifferent from their supply.
Effectively into her eighties, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon continued to work with the identical readability and curiosity that had outlined her early profession. A eager author, she revealed books together with Making the Invisible Seen (2018), Utopia Myopia: Performs on a Web page (2013), and a memoir, Why? Why not? (2013).
(Picture credit score: © fotoswiss by Giancarlo Cattaneo. Drone photographs with permission from Airport Samedan)
Later initiatives revisited acquainted issues – textual content in house, orientation, thresholds – with renewed financial system. A welcome signal for Basel, created a long time after her youth there, introduced her profession full circle, whereas drawings and work from this era distilled the backyard, the grid and town into more and more spare, symbolic kinds. Slightly than summing up her work, these late items prolonged it, reinforcing a apply rooted not in interval or model, however in sustained consideration to how folks learn, transfer by way of and make sense of the world.
Welcome, sketch by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, 2021
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the Artist & von Bartha)
‘Backyard = Grid = Metropolis’ runs till 27 February
21 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941
anthonymeier.com
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Property, Anthony Meier, and von Bartha)
Supply: Wallpaper
