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Ms. Stauffacher Solomon was the graphic designer for the mission, engaged on promotional supplies and the Sea Ranch emblem, which she formed like abstracted ram’s horns — a broad, curly Y — every horn encircling a spiral nautilus shell, a nod to each the land’s former life as a sheep ranch and to the ocean.
The architects had nestled Sea Ranch’s athletic membership (a tennis court docket, a pool and locker rooms) into berms that that they had created to defend it from the wind. The partitions inside had been unfinished plywood — cash was operating out — and so they turned the inside over to Ms. Stauffacher Solomon. With the assistance of an area signal painter, she spent three days creating monumental spatial illusions: daring diagonals, circles, arrows, letters and blocks of bull’s-eye colours. “Make it glad, child,” the contractor instructed her.
“Here was severe structure that was attempting to mix in with the encircling barns and panorama,” stated Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMOMA’s curator of structure and design, who, with Joseph Becker, wrote “The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” and curated a 2018 exhibition of the identical title. “And Bobbie paints the event’s title proper on the outside of the primary lodge in daring Helvetica typeface, and paints a wondrous graphic shock within the athletic middle’s bathe rooms, which, maybe to the architects’ ire, turned the quilt picture in structure magazines and led to the start of environmental supergraphics.
“Like Bobbie,” she added, “it was very intelligent, a little bit naughty and forward of its time.”
Ms. Stauffacher Solomon’s work landed on the quilt of Progressive Architecture journal. One of the journal’s editors, C. Ray Smith, noticing that different designers and designers across the nation had been upending house as she had, declared a motion — paint as structure — and referred to as it supergraphics. In the period of Pop Art and Op Art, supergraphics, Mr. Smith wrote, would “destroy architectural planes, distort corners and explode the oblong bins that we assemble as rooms.”
Sea Ranch turned a pilgrimage website for structure buffs and, inevitably, an expensive second-home neighborhood. Real property gained, Ms. Stauffacher Solomon typically stated. She moved on, too, to tasks in San Francisco, New York and Europe.
