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Trained as a ballet dancer, painter and graphic designer, she was at the forefront of a movement that upended design and architecture with bold graphics.
May 8, 2024, 5:34 p.m. ET
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, an audacious graphic designer, landscape architect and artist who first made a splash in the 1960s with the supersize, geometric architectural painting movement known as supergraphics, died Sunday at her home in San Francisco. She was 95.
Her daughter Nellie King Solomon confirmed her death.
In 1962, Ms. Stauffacher Solomon was the rare woman to set up shop as a graphic designer in the Bay Area, working for clients including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (now SFMOMA). Her style was bold and fresh: often red and black graphics with lots of white space, and always sans serif Helvetica lettering — an astonishing sight in San Francisco at the time, where most lettering was either traditional typefaces like Baskerville and Times Roman and, a bit later, the loopy, trippy, hippie style found on rock posters and album covers.
Ms. Stauffacher Solomon had been trained in Basel in the Swiss style of graphic design, which had a modernist ethos: a belief in the power of good design, expressed in clean-lined Helvetica, to remake society for the better.
It was architecture, however, that put Ms. Stauffacher Solomon on the national stage.
In the early 1960s, an architect turned developer named Al Boeke envisioned a new community on a windswept bluff and former sheep ranch a few hours north of San Francisco. With the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr. and Richard Whitaker, he planned a modernist utopia called the Sea Ranch, with common land and buildings shaped by, and in deference to, the wild landscape. Ms. Stauffacher Solomon was the graphic designer, working on promotional materials and the Sea Ranch logo, which she shaped like abstracted ram’s horns — a broad, curly Y — each horn encircling a spiral nautilus shell, a nod to both the land’s former life as a sheep ranch and to the sea.
The architects had nestled Sea Ranch’s athletic club (a tennis court, a pool and locker rooms) into berms they had created to shield it from the wind. The walls inside were unfinished plywood — money was running out — and they turned the interior over to Ms. Stauffacher Solomon. With the help of a local sign painter, she spent three days creating enormous spatial illusions: bold diagonals, circles, arrows, letters and blocks of bull’s-eye colors. “Make it happy, kid,” the contractor told her.
“Here was serious architecture that was trying to blend in with the surrounding barns and landscape,” said Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMOMA’s curator of architecture and design, who, with Joseph Becker, wrote “The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” and curated the 2018 exhibition of the same name. “And Bobbie paints the development’s name right on the exterior of the main lodge in bold Helvetica typeface, and paints a wondrous graphic surprise in the athletic center’s shower rooms, which, perhaps to the architects’ ire, became the cover image in architecture magazines and led to the beginning of environmental supergraphics. Like Bobbie, it was very clever, a little naughty and ahead of its time.”
