An Inscribed Copy
DESIGN QUARTERLY 127
LA 84: GAMES OF THE XXIII OLYMPIAD
Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza [Guest Designers]
Mildred Friedman [Editor]: DESIGN QUARTERLY 127: LA 84: GAMES OF THE XXIII OLYMPIAD. Cambridge: MIT Press/ Walker Art Center, 1985. First Edition. First edition. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated perfect bound wrappers. 36 pp. Fully illustrated in color. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Spine lightly sunned, but a nearly fine copy.
This copy inscribed by Deborah Sussman to E. Mark Treib, with his precision printed name, date and address inside the front cover.
8.5 x 11 softcover magazine with 36 pages designed by guest designers and editorial subjects Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza. A look at the Memphis-inspired stylings of the 1984 Los Angeles Games of the XXIII Olympiad.
This issue of Design Quarterly seems especially relevant at a time when the 2012 London games logo has raised such a hullabaloo. The graphics for the 1984 Games are considered a benchmark because they successfully converted pre-existing venues through the simple, effective, and inexpensive application of color. Sussman is particularly inspired by her early work for the Eames office. Her partner and husband lends his architectural expertise to their environmental graphics work.
Contents
- Editor's Notes
- Form, Color, Graphics
- LA's Graphic Games, Joseph Giovannini
- Credits
E. Marc Treib was awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship in Finland to study architecture and design following his 1966 graduation from the University of Florida with a BA degree in architecture. Following his return to the U.S., he earned master’s degrees in architecture (1968) and arts in design (1969) from UC Berkeley. His accomplished career includes teaching architecture and design courses as a professor at UC Berkeley; lecturing throughout the world, a prolific publishing career; and an active design practice in graphic design (books, posters, exhibitions).
Here is a lightly edited biography by Paul Prejza: Deborah Sussman [Brooklyn, 1931 – 2014] was a pioneer in the field of Environmental Graphic Design. Her contributions to the discipline have been internationally applauded, and have influenced generations of designers. Her passion for place-making and the marriage of graphics and the built environment, which Deborah coined “graphitecture”, led to extensive collaborations with planners, designers, architects and artists. Her design vision was informed by perceptive observation and rigorous documentation of communities and culture, which found its place each design of a project. Her work was populist and exuberant with an added special gift of embracing color.
In her youth in New York, Deborah attended classes at the Art Students league, visited Young Peoples Concerts at Carnegie Hall, edited and drew illustrations for the high school arts journal, participated in weekly high school radio broadcasts and visited the many museums and galleries in Manhattan. After her High School graduation, Deborah enrolled in the summer sessions at Black Mountain College, which offered a cutting edge curriculum in the Arts. She studied and worked with painter Franz Kline, musician John Cage, dancer Merc Cunningham and others. Deborah’s experiences inspired her decision to study painting and the performing arts at Bard College.
Deborah thrived in the liberal and open program at Bard College but quickly decided she would not be an actress. Exercising a Junior year option to study at a different school, one semester later, Deborah chose to stay at the Institute of Design in Chicago – the New Bauhaus; she had become infatuated with design. When Charles and Ray Eames visited the campus and presented their work, she determined that design would be her career. Describing that event later in life, she said: “the work of the Eames Office made the ordinary extraordinary”. In the summer of 1953, Deborah was chosen for a summer internship at the Eames Office in Venice, California – it lasted until the fall of 1958. In 1958, Deborah was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany. Touted as the “New Bauhaus” she found it rigid and dull after the freedom and excitement of the Eames Office and her college years. She spent most of the semester photographing vernacular architecture, signs and markets around Ulm and travelling to Pairs and Milan. In Milan, she worked several months for Studio Boggeri doing graphics, and in Paris she worked for the Galleries La Fayette department store, doing a significant body of work before returning to New York in 1961. She settled into an apartment in Manhattan and began doing freelance work, but after a few months, Charles Eames lured her back to Los Angeles to work on the Mathematica Exhibit for IBM. This began another phase of work, with a much larger Eames Office, which would last through 1967.
During more than a decade of working with the EAMES office, Deborah worked on seminal exhibits for IBM, the Government of India.True to Eames aesthetic of unconsciously using a discipline of playfulness. Deborah worked, and gained experience in, different disciplines: toy design, packaging, photography, film, print media, exhibits, signing, color and showroom design. She immersed herself in the aesthetic playfulness of the Eames multi-disciplinary style, and became a mature designer who could direct others and keep a project on track. She also became a sophisticated traveler, working in Mexico on the Day of the Dead film and spending over two months in India on the Nehru exhibit.
Deborah began her own business designing print pieces for the newly repositioned Los Angles County Museum of Art. She moved into her first studio on San Vicente Boulevard in West Los Angeles, which she shared with Frank Gehry and Gere Kavanaugh, and established herself as Deborah Sussman & Company. In 1968 she met her future husband/partner, Paul Prejza, an urban planner and architect and by 1980 the office was renamed Sussman/Prejza & Company and there, among a design and arts community that included very few women graphic designers, Deborah found her voice.
During their 40 plus years of working together Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza led thefirm in designing over 340 notable projects, for a wide range of clients, which took them to the major cities of America’s Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Deborah led the firm in designing the look and graphics for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics together with the Jerde Partnership. Many of the notable projects helmed by Deborah created a multi-dimensional graphic experience described as “urban poetry”. Along with the iconographic use of color in architecture and its close attention to the experience of public space, S/P projects garnered applause from critics and generated considerable influence among peers. During her career Deborah collaborated with some of the finest architects of our time, including Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Foster Partners, GGN, Olin, MRY, Barton Myers and SOM.
Deborah was bright and sunny always fashionably dressed, with a quick wit, a sharp sense of humor. She would flash a smile that would light up a place with an infectious laugh that would fill a room. Deborah seemed ageless. A series of photos taken six weeks before she died, picture her as someone with twenty more years in her future. She was Sui generis – One of a kind.
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.