Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, a pioneer of supergraphics, has died at the age of 95
Trained as a ballerina, painter and graphic designer, she was at the forefront of a movement that changed design and architecture through bold graphics.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, a daring graphic designer, landscape architect and artist who caused a sensation in the 1960s by creating oversized geometric architectural paintings known as supergraphics, died Tuesday at her home in San Francisco. She was 95 years old.
Her daughter Nellie King Solomon confirmed the death.
In 1962, Ms. Stauffacher-Solomon was a rare woman who set up store as a graphic designer in the Bay Area, working for clients such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (now SFMOMA). Her style was bold and fresh, often featuring red and black graphics with lots of white space and always with clean lines, a sans serif Helvetica font - a surprising sight at the time in San Francisco, where most fonts were either traditional fonts like Baskerville and Times Roman or, a bit later, the looped, trippy, hippie style found on rock posters and album covers.
She was educated in Basel, Switzerland, in the Swiss style of graphic design, which had a modernist ethic: a belief in the power of good design to change society for the better. It was architecture, however, that propelled Ms. Stauffacher Solomon onto the national stage.
In the early 1960s, an architect turned real estate developer named Al Boquet envisioned a new community on a weathered steep slope and former sheep ranch a few hours north of San Francisco. Together with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlin Lyndon, William Turnbull, Jr. and Richard Whitaker, he planned a modernist utopia called Sea Ranch, with common land and buildings shaped by and respectful of the wild landscape.
Ms. Stauffacher Solomon was the graphic designer for the project, working on promotional materials and the Sea Ranch logo, which she rendered in the shape of abstract ram's horns - wide, curled Y's - each horn surrounding a spiral nautilus shell, indicating the land's former life as a sheep ranch and at sea.
The architects put the Sea Ranch Athletic Club, which includes a tennis court, pool and locker rooms, into berms they created to protect it from the wind. The walls inside were covered with plywood - money was running low - and they turned the interior over to Ms. Stauffacher Solomon. With the help of a local artist, she spent three days creating huge spatial illusions: bold diagonals, circles, arrows, letters and bullseye-colored blocks. "Make it happy, kid", the contractor told her.