Preface for "Why?" by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Written by Erin W. Hyman
03.27.09
A Life on the Line
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is an artist who has defined the terms in a number of fields, while herself resisting definition. When applying for the Prix de Rome in the 1980s, as she recounts in the pages of this book, she didn't
know what box to check: artist? architect? landscape designer? scholar? She was all of those things, after all, but it was a gamble. She checked all the boxes anyway. And she won the Rome prize that year. This is a telling
anecdote, both in regards to her polymorphous talents and in regards to her willingness to take risks. It was all or nothing.
In each phase of her career in the U.S. and in Europe, from graphic designer to landscape architect to writer to artist, Solomon has made fundamental contributions that have both altered the critical discourse and changed the
visual fabric of the time. After rigorous graphic training in Switzerland, Solomon brought Helvetica lettering to these shores, pioneering a new wave of Swiss design thinking and typographic form. In the late 1960s, after having
innovated the logo and building-scale graphics for the Sea Ranch development in Northern California, she gained fame as the inventor of supergraphics. Many would have built on these accolades as a designer, but instead, Solomon
chose to chart a different path, getting a degree in architecture, and even then, taking an unorthodox approach by investing herself in the relationship between landscape and the built environment. What began as her master's
thesis and evolved into her first book, Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden, was a pathbreaking work reinvigorating the view of the classical garden by creating a sophisticated pictorial language. These drawings rendered
the formal specificity of a site and yet layered numerous views and perspectives (plan, section, detail), creating an experiential mapping of landscape through time. She has gone on to inclusion in museum shows, public art
commissions, the redesign of the Jardins des Tuileries, yet, until now, her contributions may have remained disparate, refracted through the lens of each discipline from typography to topography. This book is the first work
to present a composite view of these many varied phases of Solomon's career, to see continuity in reversal and reversal in continuity.
"Why?" is a graphic memoir that charts Solomon's trajectory via both narrative and image: a life on the line. Text alternates with juxtaposed drawings, each inflecting the other with a myriad of entwined evocations, invisible
lines of connection different on each view, each reading. It gives us insight into the paradoxical nature of her now rigorous, now whimsical sensibility. The writing is spare; like the bold graphics for which Solomon is famous,
its colors are undiluted, nothing is superfluous. But like the white space within and between the letters, what often seems most resonant is what she withholds. In what remains unsaid, one can only intuit the emotional contours
of events, like the negative space in between. She is brazen and yet elusive: a conundrum.
On one hand, the narrative of Solomon's life, from supporting her mother as a 17-year-old flamenco dancer in post-war San Francisco, to graphic training as a young widow and mother in Switzerland, to writing an acerbic paen to
California (Good Mourning California) after the end of her second marriage, shows how often design was for her a matter of survival. Solomon's imagined business card— "Have Pencils, Will Travel"—alludes not only to the
self-sufficiency of a portable profession (one whose primary tools can be carried in a pocket) but also to lines of flight criss-crossing the Atlantic, as well as a sense of precariousness, life as a high-wire act. If drawing
was a way to control and restrain the emotional undertow of various losses–"I needed the grid to hang on to"–it was also a way to hide–"a good cover," and a cover-up. She remains ambivalent about the status of her profession
as designer, about this aspect of disguise and illusion. An iconoclast at heart, it is as though Solomon wants to rend the immaculate surface of the aesthetic product, to constantly alert us to the aspect of design as
manipulation, seduction, falsehood. She exhorts us to be wary, not be duped by design.
And yet. And yet there is so much evident joy, so much overt pleasure in the making of her art that it's hard to imagine that her affair with the visual is anything but a love story.
The image of the "Why not?" the Y-knot, condenses so much of Solomon's sensibility, the hard-edged Swiss graphics twisted by a punster's wit, underscoring the way that word and image are one and the same, intertwined and
inseparable, the shape of every letter shifting its meaning. It also makes visible the fundamental doubleness of Solomon's relationship to design, and to life: on the one hand, a devil-may-care openness to the new ("why not?"),
on the other, the contortions one must undergo to survive the ensuing encounter ("tied in knots"). Images of dancers with legs splayed, twisted, turning into letter forms recall Solomon's early training as a dancer, while they
simultaneously evoke playfulness and discipline.
In her drawings for this book, allusions, acronyms, puns abound, every letter is like a winking hologram: both one thing and another, never itself alone. A line becomes a letter becomes a pictogram becomes a pun,
then meaning morphs again. One has the sense that in these drawings, Solomon renders letters visible as if for the first time: letters are here not transparent vehicles for a word's meaning, they have their own palpable
presence. As well as a new freedom: no longer are the graphics subordinated to the aims of ad or logo, gimmick or slogan, they are the ends in themselves.
Whereas autobiography would strive to present a seamless continuity, the wholeness of a life as though predetermined by destiny or fate, this book doesn't smooth over the gaps and discrepancies or impose a false totality on
it all: like collage, it thrives on startling juxtapositions, takes shape as much from what is missing as from what is there. The result is striking–one of a kind. Like Solomon's own career, it's a book that defies genre
or easy classification: memoir or art book? personal narrative or professional trajectory? design paen or iconoclastic critique? All of the above. Check all the boxes. It's a winning gamble.