DESIGN QUARTERLY 76
EASY COME EASY GO
Daniel Solomon and Barbara Stauffacher Soloman
Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1970. First edition [Number 76, 1970]. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated perfect bound wrappers. 28 pp. with many black and white illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
8.25 x 10.75 perfect-bound magazine with 28 pages and many black and white illustrations: "What is the key word today? Disposable. The more you can throw it away the more it's beautiful. The car, the furniture, the wife, the children—everything has to be disposable."—From "The Price" by Arthur Miller.
Daniel Solomon's essay "Notes on Ephemera" is accompanied with work by Jensen-Lewis, Daniel Solomon and Barbara Stauffacher Soloman, Hirshen & Van der Ryn, François Dallegret, Ulrich Franzen, André Courreges, Christian Girard, Shigeo Tanaka, Paul Rudolph and Soichi Hata and Akira Saito among others.
Originally conceived as an issue dedicated to the phenomenon of “supergraphics,” guest editors and designers Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Daniel Solomon broadened that charge to consider architecture in an age of disposability and ephemerality. Stauffacher Solomon designed the issue, bringing her revolutionary architectural-scale typography of the supergraphic to bear on the small-scale real estate of the magazine page. Daniel Solomon, who penned the text, argues for architecture to embrace the contemporary conditions of the ephemeral and even the fashionable, drawing parallels to the world of modern industrial design such as the automobile and to experimental works of architecture like modular or plug-in living units that can be changed over time as well as the period’s call for more a systems-based architecture. The specter of environmental degradation, however, seems oddly downplayed in the issue which was published the same year as the first Earth Day.
Design Quarterly began as Everyday Art Quarterly, published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis starting in 1946. The editorial focus aimed to bring modern design to the masses through thoughtful examination of household objects and their designers. Everyday Art Quarterly was a vocal proponent of the Good Design movement (as represented by MoMA and Chicago's Merchandise Mart) and spotlighted the best in industrial and handcrafted design. When the magazine became Design Quarterly in 1958, the editors assumed a more international flair in their selection of material to spotlight.
Here is a lightly edited biography by Alice Rawsthorn: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon [San Francisco, 1929 – 2024] was one of the most influential US graphic designers and landscape architects of the 20th centur. Best known for the thrilling “supergraphics”, the gigantic letters, symbols and patterns she designed in the mid-1960s for Sea Ranch, a newly built experimental community on a wooded stretch of the Sonoma County coast in Northern California, she is also noted for the graphics she produced for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and for her work in landscape design.
At the age of 17, she met Frank Stauffacher, a 30 years-old independent film maker, who ran weekly Art in Cinema screenings of experimental films at SFMOMA. “I fell madly in love,” she said. “He was very good looking, but he was also very kind and very smart.” They married in 1948, and became lynchpins of the West Coast cultural scene with friends including artists, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and film makers, Frank Capra and Vincent Minnelli. But in 1955, Frank died of a brain tumour, leaving the 26 years-old Bobbie as the widowed mother of their three years-old daughter, Chloe.
After Frank Stauffacher’s death, Barbara (“Bobbie") Stauffacher Solomon was left a heartbroken widow, struggling to support herself and her toddler daughter. “I needed to make money, but mostly I wanted to get away from San Francisco people staring at me after Frank died,” she told the graphic designer Adrian Shaughnessy in 2020 . “A curator friend at SFMOMA had just met the Swiss graphic designer Armin Hofmann at an Aspen Design Conference and suggested that, since I had studied art, I try graphic design.”
Accompanied by her mother, Lil, and daughter, Chloe, Bobbie moved to Switzerland in 1956 to study graphics under Hofmann at the Basel Art Institute. He helped her to enroll, and his wife Dorli found an apartment for Bobbie, Lil and Chloe. Bobbie embarked on a rigorous four-year programme of study in which Hofmann imbued her with his passion for the purist, yet elegant modernist school of “Swiss Style” graphics, which he put into practice in his work for local theatres, art galleries and museums.
“He was very good and very Swiss,” Bobbie recalled. “After a whole year of Armin telling you every day what to do with a Helvetica alphabet, your eyes were so well trained that you could spot something which was a millimetre off. You didn’t express yourself. You did what you were told. It was straight lines, black and white, and maybe a little vermilion. No tricks.”
Flinging herself into such a demanding and disciplined regime proved to be invaluable in helping to heal the anguish and trauma of Frank Stauffacher’s death. But by 1962, Bobbie felt ready to return to the U.S. “I was listening to an armed services radio station in Bonn and heard that JFK was running for president,” she said. "I thought: 'I'm going home'. I’ll swim in the bay, smell the fog and not stick out as ’The American’.”
Having returned to San Francisco after four years studying graphic design in Switzerland, Barbara (“Bobbie”) Stauffacher Solomon was eager to establish her own design practice. A friend, the landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, offered to help: first by giving her a studio space in his building; then by recommending her work to his clients and fellow architects.
Bobbie made the most of Halprin’s introductions and swiftly established herself as a talented graphic designer whose work fused the purity and discipline of the Swiss Style of design she had studied under Armin Hoffman in Basel, with the bold, playful spirit of the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid and late 1960s, and the early 1970s.
One of her principal clients was the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), which commissioned her to design its monthly programmes for over a decade. She seized the opportunity to produce an engaging, richly expressive body of work, which combined economical, yet exuberant colour contrasts and pop-inspired symbols, often blown up to fill the entire square of the programmes’ covers. The result made SFMOMA and the art it championed seem incisive and relevant, with a sense of fun.
The landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was a true friend to Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (alias “Bobbie) when she returned to San Francisco from Switzerland in 1962. Not only did he offer her a studio space in his office, he introduced her to potential clients, including the developers of what would become by far her best known and ambitious project, Sea Ranch.
. Occupying 10 miles of wild coastline blessed with a warm, summery Mediterranean climate in Sonoma County, a hundred miles north of San Francisco, Sea Ranch was a very particular type of new town developed by Oceanic Properties, a Hawaiian real estate company. Oceanic’s chief architect and vice president for community planning, Al Boeke, envisaged Sea Ranch as becoming home to a group of fellow progressives who would share similar values and be united in their desire to nurture the natural beauty of the site. He assembled a team of architects and design engineers to develop different aspects of the project in accordance with the landscape design programme conceived and delivered by Halprin.
The defining theme of Halprin’s work was to respect the original site, by enriching the land, and by designing the new buildings in ways that respected the materials and aesthetics of its historic barns, farmhouses and other agricultural structures. Halprin ensured that Bobbie was given the same freedom to design its visual identity. Her aim was to make it as striking and memorable as possible despite her frugal budget. She began with the logo, which combined a symbol of the horns of the sheep that grazed on the land with the curves of the ocean waves. “There were sheep on the land, and there were waves,” she said. “It was pure Swiss logo design. Sea Ranch was my first job - and maybe my best job.”
“Much of the design was done on the spot,” said Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher Solomon in an 1967 interview in Progressive Architecture magazine on her work on The Sea Ranch’s bathhouse. “I said: ‘Do this here and that there’ and drew a lot of lines on the walls with charcoal and string and they painted in the colours I wanted. Whenever I’d ask Mattie Silvia (The Sea Ranch’s chief builder) if it was getting to be too much, he’d say, ‘No kid, make it happy.’”
. Bobbie’s “this here and that there” formula produced the unforgettable compositions of gigantic lines and shapes that transformed the bathhouse, known as the Moonraker Athletic Club. It also established The Sea Ranch, described in its marketing slogan as ”the most unusual second-home colony ever conceived by nature and man” as a pioneer and still one of the most successful examples of what were swiftly christened Supergraphics.
The media coverage of her work at The Sea Ranch yielded other commissions for Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher Solomon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some were graphic design projects for friends in the Bay Area, such as a stint as art director of Scanlan’s Monthly, a short-lived counter culture magazine, which published some of Hunter S. Thompson’s early exercises in “gonzo” journalism, but was closed after eight issues by the FBI pending an investigation into “un-American” activities. Other projects were for supergraphics which Bobbie had designed so successfully at The Sea Ranch, such as those for the San Francisco record store HearHear and the headquarters of a local TV station, Kaiser Channel 44.
By the early 1970s Bobbie was becoming disenchanted with graphic design, not least as she felt typecast by prospective clients, and was eager to explore new terrain. Her personal life changed too. She married the architect, Dan Solomon, in 1969, and had a second daughter, Nellie. Bobbie returned to the University of California, Berkeley, to study history, then completed a master’s degree course in architecture. After graduating, landscape architecture became central to her practice, including collaborations with the artist Vito Acconci and architect Ricardo Bofill. In 1988, she published her master’s degree thesis as a book, Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden.
Bobbie also produced a succession of singular drawings, often surreal and delicate visions of landscapes, inspired by her love of 18th century formal gardens. She also taught landscape design at Harvard, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. Productive though she was, Bobbie remained on the margins of US design culture, even on the West Coast. When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art published A Handbook of California Design, 1930 to 1965, in 2013, it included profiles of over 140 Californian designers, makers and manufacturers, but not one of her.