PREMIER ISSUE SPRING 2015
COLORFUL COMMUNITY
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OWNER & FOUNDER PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Claudia Bruno Creative Director Ann Wilson Spradlin Managing Editor Andrew Wagner, Sam Grawe Senior Editors Virginia Gardiner Editor-at Large Amara Holstein Editor Amber Bravo Associate Editor Carleigh Bell Assistant Managing Editor Rachel Fudge Copy Editor Madeline Kerr, Hon Walker, Megan Mansell Williams Fact Checkers Christopher Bright Editorial Intern Brendan Callahan Senior Designer Kathryn Hansen Design Production Manager Emily CM Anderson Designer Gayle Chin Marketing Art Director Kate Stone Photo Editor Aya Brackett Associate Photo Editor Deborah Kozloff Hearey Contributing Photo Editor Fran Fox Senior Production Director Bill Lyons Production Specialist Joy Pascual Production Coordinator Romi Jacques Operations Director Wanda Smith Accounting Manager Laura MacArthur Simkins Consumer Marketing Director Brian Karo Subscriptions Manager George Clark Newsstand Consultant National Distribution Warner Publisher Services Celine Bleu Partner Marketing Director Sita Bhaumik Events Manager Elizabeth Heinrich Marketing Coordinator Kathy Chandler Marketing Intern Fida Sleiman Advertising Operations Coordinator Article Reprints FosteReprints Donna Bushore (866) 879–9144 dbushore@fostereprints.com
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Lara Hedberg Deam Michela O’Connor Abrams Allison Arieff Letterform Advertising Offices (Los Angeles) (212) 383–2010 International Sales Director W. Keven Weeks keven@lettermag.com Eastern Regional Manager Kathryn McKeeeer kathryn@lettermag.com New England/Canada Sales Manager Wayne Carrington wayne@lettermag.com Sales Coordinator Joanne Lucano joanne@lettermag.com West Coast BARBARA BELLA & ASSOCIATES Danny Della Lana (San Francisco) (415) 986–7762 danny@bbasf.com James Wood (Los Angeles) (323) 467–5906 woods@bbala.com Midwest DERR MEDIA GROUP Timothy J. Derr (847) 615–1921 derrmediagroup@comcdst.net KAREN TEEGARDEN & ASSOCIATES Diane MacLean (248) 642–1773 diane@kteegarden.com Southwest NUALA BERRELLS MEDIA Nuala Berrells (214) 660–9713 nuala@sbcgloba.net Southeast Andy Clifton (706) 369–7320 cljfton@fccmedia.com
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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Editor’s Letter 10
FEATURE ARTICLES
Spotting Type 12
WE ARE LIGHT
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LONDON OLYMPIC PARK Rowan Moore WAY FINDER GARAGE Alex Peemoeller
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PASSING TIME Anton Parsons
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STRAW TYPE EXHIBIT Farmgroup
Social Form 18
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A COMMUNITY SPEAKS Boamistura and Teo Sandigliano
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BALTIMORE BUS STOP Gregory Maher
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ENVIRONMENTAL TYPE Nicole Dextras
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Boamistura The words spelled out on the facade are “Somos Luz” (“We are Light”) and Boamistura says, “The message aims to inspire daily, not only the neighbors, but other people who walk by the building every day.” Boamistura says they are trying to use participative urban art as a tool for encouragement in run-down communities.
DEBORAH SUSSMAN: LOVER OF L.A.
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Christopher Hawthorne With a slate of current projects on her desk, including graphics and signage for parks and performing art centers, Sussman shows no sign of slowing down. When someone complimented her on her retrospective, she quickly corrected him. “It’s only retrospective until 1984! There will be another show — from ’84 on!”
MARION CENTRE
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Rachel Arm The building has the word ‘Marion’ into the facade and external features of the building, an interesting concept that gives each and every visitor something unified to ingest. The intent is to encapsulate the vision of Marion as a technology-driven smart zone, in a striking and unique design.
MOVING TYPE
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Stephen Coles Located at the back of the Rijksmuseum on Museumplein, the large I Amsterdam slogan quickly became a city icon and a much sought after photo opportunity. Visitors photograph themselves, in, around and on top of the slogan, and it always manages to inspire the novice photographer. At more than 2 meters tall, the slogan measures over 23.5 meters wide.
MEMORIAL BOWLING
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Jess Green This commemorative artwork imagines a creative possibility out of the destruction of the Orange Bowl. A Memorial Bowing recalls the enormous Miami Orange Bowl sign from the stadium that stood on this site from 1937 until its demolition in 2008. The letters from the sign are reconstructed at their original ten-foot height.
URBAN PLAY PROJECT
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Andrew Thompson On September 13, 2008, Sagmeister Inc. began the installation of a mural on Waagdragerhof Square in Amsterdam. Over the course of eight days, with the help of more than 100 volunteers, 250,000 euro-cent coins were sorted into four different shades and placed over a 300 sq. meter area to spell out the sentence: Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.
ON THE C OV E R
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E D ITOR’S L E T T E R
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR This premier issue of Letterform, a ‘Colorful Community’, celebrates a great era for the art, craft and business of type right now. Whether you are a type maker or user, a typographer, type designer, technologist, art director, designer or reader, there is an explosion of products and services to meet every need. Nearly every stage in the process of design, from first idea to last look, is aided by slow-burning yet revolutionary improvements in the way type is produced, distributed, rendered, printed and hinted. Individual type designers, whether established or straight out of college, can set up shop and reach customers directly thanks to the Web’s vast marketplace while the bigger foundries constantly refine their work for corporate and individual clients. And a classic typeface such as Britanica can emerge, like a Modernist phoenix, from the ashes of British Rail’s nationalized pas. This is a fate somewhat different to that of the hand-lettered headlines in ‘Drawn to be wild’, now rescued from obscurity by Rian Hughes. There are more typefaces than ever before, including many that, in the words of Paul Shaw (who contributes a terrific piece on the minutiae of optical sizing, evoke the ‘spirit of the past’. Such fonts may be brand new, sensitive revivals or extended super families. Spawned by a research project, Metahaven strive to find new roles as thinkers and self-directed strategists for graphic designers, hoping to change
This premier issue of Letterform, a ‘Colorful Community’, celebrates a great era for the art, craft and business of type — right now. the possibly outmoded ‘client-studio’ model of conventional practice. Reflecting on nearly 23 years at the helm of TDR (who have legions of admirers worldwide), Anderson looks at the impact of that model, complete with account-handlers on his practice, which he now says ‘was trying to do something it was better not being… when I took a back seat … it died.’ Enjoy the Issue. Meredith Jones, Editor
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S P OTTING T Y P E
LONDON OLYMPIC PARK RUN INSTALLATION BY ROWAN MOORE
“Here’s the thing about the Olympics. It’s a magnificent event, engaging, as it does, most of the planet in the innocent idea of playing games extremely well, and if it avoids disasters it can make the host nation feel good about itself.”
Top: Up close view of “R” in which relefections of the Olymipic park can be seen. Right: RUN has been created to produce a mirrored affect which changes depending on the light and time of the day.
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They will boost tourism actually Olympic cities will usually experience a decline in visitors. They will be sustainable, but only in the sense that a space rocket powered by biofuel would be sustainable. They will cost the government £2.37bn, or, rather, £9.3bn; or, if all associated costs are included, even more. So to make the Games work, circles have to be squared, compromises made and deals done. Sponsors become gods, because without them there would be no Games, and
Photographer David Watson, Dave Banbury
But it is also insanely expensive in both money and also in risk, thanks in part to the tyrannical demands of the International Olympic Committee, and profoundly unsustainable, as it requires an immense amount of construction for a 17–day event plus 12 for the Paralympics. The numbers don’t add up, so the Games are sold to citizens on the basis of promises that turn out to be false. They will increase participation in sport and reduce obesity they don’t.
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S P OTTING T Y P E
downright terrible. All of which is ever truly admirable, but it’s an achievement that always comes with conditions and compromises. Look at the stadium, like all its predecessors, it struggles to find a viable future use. The sense of community is for Visa cardholders only and sustained by batteries of Rapier missiles. There is a weird alternation of the profligate and the miserly: to hold the Games at all is absurdly extravagant, and the security budget grows at will, but places such as the athletes’ village, where thousands will live in the future are squeezed hard by time and money, such that they are less wonderful than they might otherwise be. The event is held in the name of the public but its portal is a private shopping mall only open to a few members. Part of what is good about the Olympics is captured by the buildings such as the wood-clad, a wavy-roofed beauty Velodrome by Hopkins Architects, a structure beautifully
Top: A shining 30ft tall sculpture of the word RUN, is made of steel and reflective glass. Right: During daylight, the letters will act as a mirror for visitors and their surroundings. Left: At night the letters are set to become more transparent and glow with 300 metres of LED lighting that bounces off internal curved mirrors.
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Photographers David Watson, John Penberthy, Kevin Neagle
the branding police enforce their will. Demands of surveillance and security become boundless. Everything has to be on point message. The oppositions of the Olympics are ingrained in the built fabric of London 2012, which is now essentially finished, awaiting little more than for the meadow flowers seeded in the site’s gardens to flourish in synchrony with the big event, and for the completion of the stadium wrapper sponsored by Dow Chemical. It’s an urban effort of a scale and ambition that this country has not managed for a long time. It has so far been smoothly delivered, without the baleful stories of near-disaster that accompanied the construction of the Athens Olympics, or the reports of multiple deaths on the Beijing stadium site. There are intelligent strategies for dealing with at least some of the problems that usually afflict the Games. There are several well designed structures and not much that is
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S P OTTING T Y P E
There is intelligence, investment, and talent combined with hard work in the Olympic park and buildings, albeit not always organised in the most useful way. alliance of politicians and corporations in making expensive but empty statements that miss out any real connection with the human race. The Orbit, by the artist Anish Kapoor and the engineer Cecil Balmond, seems to be something to do with art, as expressed by its red squiggly form, and something to do with access, evidenced by the stairs rising up it, but the two don’t seem very happily combined. The official blather is that it is “very aspirational, in a very appropriately Olympic way”: alternatively, you could listen to a man I overhead trying to explain it to his family, “It’s what they call sculpture. It’s just there to make you ask, ‘What is it?’ “ Between these dollops of construction is green stuff and air: it is the park that has to make everything cohere and smooth the abrupt transitions between the lumps
of building. Designed by the American landscape architect George Hargreaves, it does a remarkably good job, starting with the fact that it pays some attention, unlike most things Olympic, to what was already there. As Iain Sinclair has pointed out, much was expunged to make way for the Games, but Hargreaves has the sense to use and improve all of what’s left, creating a closeness to water, a wandering, intricate tissue of overlapping layers and loose, shaggy planting. In places the vegetation is dominated by the expanses of hard surface necessary to cope with Olympic crowds and by the temporary paraphernalia of the Games. After the Games the hard surfaces will shrink, as will the many bridges over the water, and the green will increase. At the Games, intense effort is put into throwing metal balls.
Daytime photograph taken by Andy Matthews from behind the RUN installation in London
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Photographer Andy Matthews
attuned to its purpose, spare in construction, which sits on a little hill with elegant festivity. Also by relatively unsung structures such as the temporary venues for basketball and water polo, which are stylish but relatively straightforward ways of getting the job done. Or the Copper Box, a plain but effective container for handball, which is one of the best works of its architects Make. Or the electrical substation, a handsome brick structure by the Glaswegian practice Nord, and the rust-coloured Energy Centre by John McAslan and Partners. Like Olympic sports, these embody the focused pursuit of the good to exceptional in a precise if limited field. A lot of what is worst about the Olympics is captured by the Orbit: the grandstanding, the gesture-making, the unholy
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S OC I A L F O R M
A COMMUNITY SPEAKS BY BOAMISTURA and TEO SANDIGLIANO
The term “Boamistura” is derived from the Portuguese term “good mixture”, referring to diversity of careers and perspectives of each member. We painted our first mural in the late 2001. We adopted the name Boamistura in 2002 and in January 2010 we opened our own studio in Madrid. We’ve been invited to show our work at the Biennale di Venezia, and the Biennial of South of Panamá; and have taken part of exhibitions in Art Centers such as the Reina Sofía Museum, Casa Encendida, DA2 Museum and CAC Málaga. At this time we are collaborating with Ponce and Robles Gallery in Madrid. We have worked together with foundations such as ONCE (Spanish national organization for the blind), Oxfam Intermon, Red Cross. We are a multidisciplinary team with roots in graffiti art. Born in late 2001, Madrid, Spain. We develop our work mainly in the public space. We have carried out many of our projects in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Algeria, Norway, South Africa and Panamá. Top: Close up view of the letterform “G” showing the community’s cooperation in the project. The locals art was trapped within the letterforms and surrounded by white negative space. Bottom: One of the locals from the community coming to help Boamistura spray paint the mural by adding their own personal art work.
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Symbiosis is a series of collaborative murals realized in two stages: the first one is a collaborative part, where everybody is welcome to participate. We generate a color background with messages and drawings by every participant. In the second stage, we partially cover that background with white, painting only the surrounding space of the characters of an inspiring sentence. The result: colored words framed with white, composing “Inspiration” in Rio de Janeiro, “Joy” in Algiers or “porque sueño, no estoy loco” (Because I dream, then I’m not crazy) in Zaragoza community. The messages are always linked to the place. For example “joy” is painted in “alegria”. It has the same letters of the country’s name but in different order. It is written in Spanish because the wall belongs to the Instituto Cervantes in Algiers. The workshop was carried out with all the students studying there. “Life rewards those who love and purse beauty” in Querétaro, México. Painted in the frame of “ciclos,” an architecture symposium to which we were invited. The quote is taken from the eminent Mexican architect Luis Barragán. And so… We could continue with each one of them, always having in common an inspiring background which we believe that can help us in our day to day.
Photographer Boamistura
Five friends from the same neighborhood who met painting graffiti on the street when they were fifteen. Today, under the name Boamistura, have managed to play with art and melt the hearts of people.
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S OC I A L F O R M
Symbiosis, in collaboration with the Asociación Argadini and Orange Foundacion, built between 2011 and 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, Algiers, Zaragoza and Madrid was developed in 2 phases. The first in which the public had a wall available to express themselves through a serious of drawings, and ideas. During the first stage, we invited the students attending the Cervantes cultural centre to create graffiti work on a wall. The second, once the space, which was spread a layer of white on the murals except for a sentence within the wall where the letters are generated by the previous work. These phrases are in Rio “Inspiração” (inspiration) in Algiers “Alegria” (oh joy), in Zaragoza “Porque no sueño estoy loco “(Because I’m not crazy dream) and Madrid” Let the power of imagination makes us infinite.” After the various stages where complete, the space created was one to behold. It was became an urban space where participants could express their creativity as real graffiti artists, with spray cans and brushes.
The result: a large multicoloured mural. As street artists, we stepped in to our own work on the same wall for the second stage, using a method we had already tried out in other places as part of the “Proyecto Simbiosis”, in Rio de Janeiro and Zaragoza. Boamistura painted over most of the mural in white, extracting fragments of the original work in words that conceal and lay bear to the artists’ graffiti. The word that emerged in Algiers was “Alegría”, joy. Not just a play on words, but an expression of a great festive participation. Throughout this process, the street artists’ have turned the ordinary cities into a universal language for cultural promotion.
Right Top: The finished mural in La Paz, Bolivia says “El Futuro es Hoy” — “The Future is Today” evoking an inspirational message for the local people in the community. Right Bottom: The colorful mural created in 2012 in Madrid, Spain fully reads “Let the Power of Imagination Make Us Infinite.”
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Photographer Boa Mistura
Top: Young girl from the community paints part of the wall for the “Alegria” mural.
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W E A R E L IG FOREWORD BROOKLYN STREET ART
ARTICLE BY BOAMISTURA
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It’s easy to look at the facade of a massive housing complex and forget that there are individual stories inside. From the neighborhood of El Chorrilo in Panama City comes a new face for that kind of building via the work of the five-man Spanish artist collective Boamistura. Taking the community aspect of their work to heart, these guys just finished turning a monolithic mass of housing into a vibrant grouping of individual homes, personalizing the scale with a little typography and a lot of color. The words spelled out on the facade are “Somos Luz” (“We are Light”) and Boamistura says, “The message aims to inspire daily — not only the neighbors — but other people who walk by the building every day.” By painting all the hallways, balconies, and landings in an ever-changing abstract color compositions Boamistura says they are trying to use participative urban art as a tool for encouragement in run-down communities and a way to work with the local residents in to improve their home environment. The exterior converted now into abstract color compositions that come to life with daily scenes like hanging clothes or people looking out the balcony. Sponsored by the first Biennial Of The South in Panama 2013 their project is part a series of public works they call “Crossroads”. Somehow despite the miracles and wealth and technological breakthroughs of the modern age we have allowed the majority of our brothers and sisters and neighbors around the globe to live in harsher conditions and mounting insecurity. Madrid-based Street Art quartet Boamistura created a project they call SOMOS LUZ when they created a transformative piece of art taking over an entire housing project building in Panamá City. Their short documentary is a thoughtful examination that features daily scenes, observations on the political climate, the militarization of life, crime, the brutal cost of daily life. As any mature artist will likely tell you, the work doesn’t resound so deeply until you have some skin in the game, and Boamistura make a serious study to learn from the people in El Chorrillo whose 50 homes they paint. In the process, they bring a lot to light.
W
e are a multidisciplinary team with roots in graffiti art. Born in late 2001, Madrid, Spain. We develop our work mainly in the public space. We have carried out projects in South Africa, USA, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Georgia, Algeria, Norway, Serbia and Panamá. We were 15 years old when we first met, while painting the walls of our neighborhood. We became friends since then. Our studio is in Madrid, but we spend the day from here to there, living among paint buckets, computers and ping-pong matches. We love what we do. We understand our work, as a tool to transform the street and to create bonds between people. We feel a responsibility with the city and time we are living in. We’ve been invited to show our work at the Biennale di Venezia, and the Biennial of South of Panamá; and have taken part of exhibitions in Art Centers such as the Reina Sofía Museum, Casa Encendida, DA2
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Museum and CAC Málaga. At this time we are collaborating with Ponce+Robles Gallery in Madrid. We have worked together with foundations such as ONCE (Spanish national organization for the blind), Oxfam Intermon, Red Cross. Other foundations, have acquired our artworks … Fundación Telefónica, DKV insurances, Fundación Antonio Gala or Universidad de Alcalá. We’ve given lectures at TEDxMadrid and Universities such as Complutense de Madrid, TEC de Monterrey, Menéndez Pelayo, Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad de Sevilla and also we have been invited to Art and social transformation and developed workshops in universities like Universidad Isthmus from Panama, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in México and ETSAM School of Architecture in Madrid. The term “Boamistura” comes from the portuguese “good mixture”, referring to diversity of careers and perspectives of each member. We painted our first mural in
the late 2001. We adopted the name Boamistura in 2002 and in January 2010 we opened our own studio in Madrid. Some members of the Boa family that have put their bit on our studio: Javier Peralta, Elba Recalde, Blanca Somoza, Dani de Julio, Anita Soares y Diego Vicente. “Somos Luz” (We are light) is the message we chose to write, with the neighbors help, on the 50 apartments of the Begonia I building in the community of El Chorrillo in Panama. The piece is so big (more than 2000 meters painted) that we can say it is inhabited and changes with the neighbors’ interaction. Not only the facade, but the corridors and stairways were painted as well, they are turned now into an abstract color composition that comes to life every time the neighbors hang the wet clothes or just look out from the balcony. Located right next to the old town, in the slope of the Cerro Ancón, in front of the Panamá City bay. The
origin of El Chorrillo dates back to the early 20th century. It was first built with wooden houses for the fishermen living in this area. There was a sudden change in its history on December 20th of 1989, “El Chorrillo” was invaded and devastated by the US army. It was until 1991 when, as a compensation act, the actual buildings were constructed: concrete blocks with highly questionable
small dimensions are now the rooms where families live crowded. Nowadays, El Chorrillo is associated to 14 gangs that control the neighborhood and have turned it into one of the city’s main red areas. But after all, behind all this violence we have found a place with wonderful people that opened their homes to us. We detected a pattern that was being repeated across
most part of the buildings: the patchwork that spontaneously was generated by a neighbor that painted his own balcony. We were inspired by the neighbourhood’s identity, and particularly by the colour grid spontaneously generated by every resident when they paint only the part of the building that they consider to be their own living unit. Thus part of the beauty of the repainting is
Apartment owners participated in the painting of the letters outside of their individual homes.
The colors were inspired by the colors used by apartment owners colors they used in their homes.
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its preservation of the color selections that signify the eclecticism of the building’s tenants, as well as the actual participation of the tenants in the painting process. The new typographic layer modifies this grid by turning it into a community concept. The work (which involved the participation of the building’s residents) took over more than 2000 square meters, including not only the building’s facade, but also corridors and stairways. The concept was based on a color grid that, when seen from up close, looks like abstract shapes but, from a distance, spells out their proud bright message. It’s win-win all around. The building got a much needed coat of paint. The community, down to the young children, were included in the project. And a sense of well-deserved pride was instilled in all who live in the Begonia I building. The message wants to inspire daily not only neighbors, but also all the people passing by that way, reminding them that each is invaluable, regardless of where they live.
The community, down to the young children, were included in the project. Modifying this grid, we decided to use typography in order to lose the actual unity and win a sense of community. The message seeks to daily inspire the neighbors and also the rest of people who passes by the building, reminding them, that every person has an invaluable value, no matter where they were born or now live. The project sponsored by the Biennial South in Panama is part of the Crossroads series that uses art as a tool for social integration, since it always ends up involving local residents to improve their own space. There is a total of six projects we created for the Crossroads series. “Every crossroad leads to another on the journey it links us to each other unknowing what´s to discover. At these intersections we meet up with a lover an enemy and a future we can´t compare. Every crossroad leads to another that we humanly share.” The building was a total of 70m long by 15m high and housed 50 apartments. The project took place in March of 2013 in El Chorrillo. Panama City.
A grid was created on the exterior of the apartments before the color was added.
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The close up photo shows the concept of the color grid, in which up close the forms look like abstract shapes. However, when standing further back it reveals the community’s message of hope.
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DEBORAH SUSSMAN LOVER OF L.A. Premier Issue . Letterform
CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE
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T
here were some outward signs, truth be told, that it might not have been the ideal day for an interview. Deborah Sussman, the pioneering Los Angeles designer and one of the creators of that hybrid of architecture and large-scale signage known as supergraphics, was in the middle of moving offices, transferring decades of material from a space on the edge of Culver City to a smaller one in L.A.’s Chinatown. But when I went to speak with Sussman, she
Sussman was ready to discuss the range of her design work, which has included, once she left the Eames office in 1968, transforming the interior of the Forum in Inglewood for a Rolling Stones tour in 1975; collaborations with Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, and a number of other architects; signage and wayfinding for new public projects in Los Angeles; and, most famously of all, colorful and light-on-theirfeet designs with Jon Jerde for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. was as upbeat, talkative, and quick-witted as I’d remembered. Sussman was ready to discuss the range of her design work, which has included, once she left the Eames office in 1968, transforming the interior of the Forum in Inglewood for a Rolling Stones tour in 1975; collaborations with Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, and a number of other architects; signage and wayfinding for new public projects in Los Angeles; and most famously of all, colorful and the light-on-their-feet designs with Jon Jerde for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
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I sneaked in a question now and then, and gave her my thoughts, when she inquired, about some Los Angeles architects past and present. Hyde and Sussman had laid out images from a few projects — which included the Olympics, but also more recent commissions — on a glass-topped coffee table in the center of the smallish living room, and the collection of photographs acted as a loose guide for the conversation. Mostly, although, Sussman, who was wearing oversize round black glasses, à la Le Corbusier, and a scarf that she described as having been designed for “a major global client headquartered in the Midwest,” that she couldn’t name thanks to a nondisclosure agreement, was the one clearly holding court. And after a few timely namedropping seemingly tailored for me personally, “See that Picasso jug? That was a gift from Esther McCoy,” she was very direct about the points she wanted to make. First, though she was truly thrilled with the recent Woodbury exhibition, curated by the Los Angeles architect Barbara Bestor in The Deborah Sussman show featured a range of the designer’s work and was designed in such a way to showcase the designer’s love of vivid and expressive colors in her designs.
Photo by WUHO a part of Woodbury University
collaboration with Catherine Gudis, Thomas Kracauer, and Shannon Starkey, she wanted to stress that her output has in no way diminished since 1984, the year the show comes to a close. Indeed, even now she is past 80, Sussman and Prejza’s firm remains the go-to office when a certain kind of high-profile Los Angeles civic project — a new park, say, or subway line — needs graphic design, branding, or wayfinding help. For the year-old Grand Park, a much anticipated space that stretches down Bunker Hill between Grand Avenue, the site of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Los Angeles City Hall, Sussman/ Prejza designed squared-off green-and-silver totem poles, illuminated from within, that spell out the phrase “the park for everyone” in dozens of different languages. The goal was not just to design the various entrances, but, in a very basic sense, to let the city know the park was there, since it occupies
Deborah Sussman attended the opening of the exhibit and discussed a range of her design work with the other guests attending the exhibit.
Photo by WUHO a part of Woodbury University
That said, it’s not as though she was a rather awkward sloping site wedged ruling out the early work as a topic of between a couple of unfortunately large conversation. Her work in the late 1960s with and blocky county buildings from the 1960s. Gehry on a series of J. Magnin stores was For the Metropolitan Transportation Authorone of her first real breakthroughs; the giant ity, which runs Los Angeles’ mass-transit Js and Ms stenciled on the side of the stores system, the firm has collaborated with in pinks, oranges, greens, browns, and blues the architecture firm Johnson Fain on a were a precursor to the supergraphics she’d new kit of parts meant to unify the design use regularly later on. Recalling that project of new light-rail and subway systems. The prompted her to reminisce about a kind of graphics were watered down a bit as the collaboration she no longer sees in the project moved through the MTA bureaudesign world. “In those early days,” she said, cracy, but in their clarity, directness, and “the designers were not separated from sense of youthful energy, they are full of landscape architects, bona fide architects, Sussman trademarks. and mere graphic designers or from artists In both of those recent projects, the firm and writers. We all hung out together.” had been doing work that is crucial to Los She was certainly happy to talk about the Angeles’ sense of self. Indeed, if Sussman ‘84 Olympics especially the undervalued role complained a bit that she has less design that the entertainment lawyer Harry Usher, freedom than she once had, the work she is a top aide to Peter Ueberroth in planning doing now is every bit as meaningful. In fact, the games, had played in protecting her the stakes may even be higher now, given designs from troublesome meddling. For that Los Angeles now faces some fundaany ambitious design project to succeed, mental questions about what kind of place Sussman told me, you need “one person it is going to be: how vertical in the face of who supports good ideas and who has the its horizontal past, and how connected and power and the clout to say yes.” public in the face of its deep historic privatSussman created those items (in a ization and obsession with the automobile. bright palette of magentas, oranges, reds, and pinks) with television in mind. A dry run of sorts in 1983 gave her and Jerde a clear sense of how the designs would play on-screen. “We worked very closely with ABC,” she remarked. “We knew what every camera angle would be.” Sussman’s Olympic designs essentially took the idea of supersize graphics and made it the basis of a wide-ranging design strategy for medal stands, temporary seating, and signs.
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The palette for the Olympics was drawn from Sussman’s personal experience and her research about the design details in important public rituals in a number of Pacific Rim countries, including Mexico, Japan, and the U.S.
Photo by Sussman/Prejza and the LAOOC design team
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Those objects, in turn, helped cement a certain clear idea of Los Angeles, informal, optimistic, international, forward-looking, that would rule in the public imagination until the 1992 riots brought a more troubled view to the forefront than anticipated. Not that her Olympics work was universally cheered by other designers in L.A. “The old-boys graphic design network in Los Angeles had its nose out of joint because this little woman was in charge,” she told me. “The old boys said: ‘We need gray to make it work.’ But the color I use is always conceptual as well as visual, there is always a reason for it.” In the case of the Olympics, she said, the palette was drawn from both The color I use is always conceptual as well as visual — there is always a reason for it.
personal experience and research about the design details in important public rituals in a number of Pacific Rim countries, including Mexico, Japan, and the U.S. Her graphics suggested not Kenneth Frampton’s “critical regionalism” but a kind of celebratory regionalism, upbeat and cannily carefree. It was not long after the Olympics that Apple hired the firm to produce new graphic design and wayfinding for the company’s Cupertino Campus. The project began after Steve Jobs had been forced out of Apple in 1985. Sussman/Prejza’s concept took icons from the Macintosh screen—arrows, numbers, and even the small animal Apple aficionados know as the “dogcow” and blew them up to a scale of ten- or 15-feet high. As a result, they became cartoonishly pixelated. When Jobs came back to Apple from professional exile and saw the design, Prejza told me, “He said he didn’t like it.” Added Sussman, “He said it was the past.” To my eye, though, the Apple designs looked as fresh as anything from the Sussman/ Prejza back catalogue, a kind of 80s-revivalmeets-New Aesthetic mash-up. And about her time with Charles and Ray Eames? It’s hard to think that Sussman could ever tire of that topic. And why would she? Who wouldn’t want to talk about coming to Los Angeles in 1953 as a 22-year-old aspiring designer and finding a productive place in a multidisciplinary office that was busy rewriting the rules of design practice, and churning out furniture, films, toys, packaging, and architecture? Sussman was, of course, clever and Altogether 130 sites were scattered across Southern California transforming the area into a cohesive Olympic community.
Photos by Sussman/Prejza and the LAOOC design team
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determined enough to use that very springy found, intact.) Sussman held the letter up, so launching pad to forge her own career and that I could see its still youthful handwriting, sensibility, one that from the vantage point and began to read. “Dear Folks,” she read. of 2014 looks as instrumental to L.A.’s civic “Could life be more beautiful? I am living at self image as even the Eameses were. the Eames house, since Friday…Right now I In fact, Sussman told me I wasn’t allowed am seated in a cozy alcove, an Eames built-in to leave until I’d looked at a letter she’d sent sofa covered with brilliant Indian blankets to her parents in the fall of 1954, when she and silken pillows.” Every day, Sussman told was 23, while housesitting at the Eames her parents, she had the luxury of waking up house and studio in Pacific Palisades. I sat in a house filled with “huge lanterns,” “giant next to her on the sofa while she unfolded philodendrons,” “dozens of Indian Kachina the letter, whose paper was cracked and dolls,” and “Chinese pots and books,” and peeling. (There was a moment of panic when of “looking out at eucalyptus trees touching page three couldn’t be located; it was later the glass walls, trees 90-feet high, looking
through them over a long, wide meadow. And beyond that, the sea…” Sussman paused and looked at me, eyes full of light, all those files packed for the office move no longer a worry, the stresses of uncooperative clients (and unreliable journalists!) and momentarily forgotten. “I mean, twentythree years old. Can you imagine?”
The Olympic Park was designed to be cameraready from every angle.
Photo by Sussman/Prejza and the LAOOC design team
This was Los Angeles, bright, colorful and full of promise … Now, we know, in part, whom to thank.
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