Archinect - News

CannonDesign is pitching in to help acclimate migrants to NYC

2023-05-15T14:52:00-04:00

A new project from CannonDesign aimed at helping migrants who were relocated to Brooklyn’s Red Hook Cruise Terminal in the past year is providing hope to advocates for inclusive design as the city grapples with a vexing crisis that’s only expected to grow with the end of Title 42.

The project was initiated by Blue Cottage of CannonDesign team member Kimberly Silver, a resident of Red Hook, who, in reaction to Councilwoman Gale Brewer’s charge to do more, worked with fellow CannonDesign staffers Steffany Brady, Dylan Coonrad, and Abbey Furlow to strategize a set of wayfinding design solutions that can help better orient them to the neighborhood and city. Together, they say three core “functions” can be achieved as a result of the project.

Using Silver’s observations of the area, TRANSIT activates street surfaces and other barriers surrounding the terminal with clear trail marker-like visual wayfinding directions to the subway and nearby bus stations.

Image courtesy CannonDesign

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Brooklyn’s historic Domino Sugar Factory restoration lights up with signs of progress

2022-12-28T13:29:00-05:00

A beloved monument returned to the Brooklyn skyline without pomp or circumstance last night when the Domino Sugar sign was quietly relit atop the Thomas Havemeyer building’s new barrel vaulted glass roof, illuminating the Williamsburg waterfront for the first time in eight years. It also marked one last milestone in 2022 for redevelopment at the former refinery, which was last open to the public in 2014

Meanwhile, PAU’s portion of the $250 million Domino Sugar Factory project is nearing completion with the placement of the structural steelwork required to support the 27,000-square-foot glass addition slotted into its 140-year-old interior.

Image © Wes Tarca

New York YIMBY also reported that construction of the reinforced concrete core is complete as well. The tree-lined and column-free office portion is yet to be fully leased in spite of the space’s considerable marketability. The full restoration is expected to be ready sometime in the next year.

On the mystery and magic appeal of LA's iconic visual language

2022-05-19T16:51:00-04:00

The apartment signs of L.A. announce location through flair, decadence, strangeness, absurdity, signification. When you see an otherwise unremarkable name affixed to a building in your neighborhood, you know — probably to the exact number of paces or miles, if you counted — how much further your intended destination is. That’s the thing about L.A. apartment signs — they point you toward where you need to be: home.

The LA Times has a really cool new series I am personally obsessed with wherein the “architecture of everyday life” is explored in and around the city. In this iteration, the Times’ style editor Ian Blair waxed poetic about LA’s midcentury typographical elements, best embodied on the facade of Paul Revere Williams’ iconic Beverly Hills Hotel, that are now synonymous with the visual imagination of Southern California feted by David Hockney and so many others.

Image courtesy Joe Wolf via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Blair spoke to the alien nature of the language contained in apartment typeface, commenting on their need to communicate intimations of luxury and class in a way in which words alone become a most effective means of conveying the interiority of space (no matter how illusory).

“Apartment signs affect us because of the amount of effort put into the premise: Please stop, look, come inside, see if you desire to belong here. There’s innuendo baked into the concept; the main selling poi...

Los Angeles honors President Obama with renaming of two roads

2018-09-05T16:13:00-04:00

Rodeo Road will be renamed after President Barack Obama, city leaders decided this week. But it’s not the first roadway in LA that lawmakers agreed to name after the 44th president. In 2017, the state legislature approved a resolution to designate the stretch of the 134 freeway that runs between Pasadena and Eagle Rock as the President Barack H. Obama Highway. A year later, however, there’s little evidence of that decision.

A 3.7 mile stretch of road in Los Angeles, now called Rodeo Road, will be renamed Obama Boulevard honoring the country’s first African American president. Located in the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw neighborhood, the road was chosen for its significance in the black community and its relation to a 2007 rally site Obama held at the beginning of his campaign.

Obama Boulevard is not scheduled to be fully renamed until Presidents Day in 2019. Another Obama named stretch of road in Los Angeles is also awaiting new signage. A stretch of the 134 freeway running between Pasadena and Eagle Rock has been approved to be named the President Barack H. Obama Highway, however the money for new signage has yet to be raised.

New documentary short film shows off the groundbreaking design work of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

2018-05-07T14:32:00-04:00

"To design is to see as in foresee; to draw visions not previously seen," says the groundbreaking designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon in a new short documentary film about her work and life. A dancer-turned-graphic designer, Solomon was born in San Francisco but trained in Switzerland at the Basel Art Institute. Combining hard-edge Swiss graphics with California Abstract Expressionism, she defined California cool in the '60s.

Sea Ranch Tennis Club supergraphics by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. Photo © Jim Alinder/Princeton Architectural Press

An enduring visionary, the style Solomon pioneered came to be known as supergraphics: large graphics applied with vibrant colors, usually in geometric shapes, to walls or floors and ceilings to make the illusion of altered space. She is best known for her interior of Lawrence Halprin's 1960s Sea Ranch and her 1991 Ribbon of Light installation at the Embarcadero Promenade in San Francisco.

Kaiser Channel 44, KBHT T.V. Studio by Barbara Stauffache...

The MetLife Building’s letters are getting a makeover

2017-06-07T12:54:00-04:00

While the Brutalist architecture of the MetLife Building, formerly the Pan Am Building, makes this 59-story skyscraper stand out among Midtown’s many tall towers, its large sign touting its namesake makes it easy for all to identify. Beginning this week, the insurance company will replace the massive letters with a brand new typeface, as Crain’s reported.

The installation of the new, more modern logo will be the first time the building’s sign has changed since 1993 when 15- and 18-foot-long letters spelling out MetLife replaced Pan Am’s sign.

Toilets for everyone: the politics of inclusive design

2015-11-05T13:31:00-05:00

With the issues of serving openly in the military and same-sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all-gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community — particularly the “T” part. Schools and universities (...), museums (...), restaurants (...) and even the White House (...) are recasting the traditional men’s/women’s room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary.

Los Angeles has Created the Perfect Parking Sign

2015-04-06T15:11:00-04:00

In the quest to make parking suck less, there are apps that help you find a space, and meters where you can pay with a swipe of your credit card. But LA has launched a simple, low-tech solution to make parking better: Well-designed signage that offers no ambiguity whatsoever when it comes to where you can park, when you can park there, and how much it will cost.

Community Bus Stops Transform Brazil

2014-09-05T13:55:00-04:00

Thousands of bus stops in Brazil completely lack signage to indicate which buses actually stop there. The nation-wide inconvenience has finally been tackled by one of the biggest community projects in the world. ‘Que Ônibus Passa Aqui?’ (‘Which Bus Stops here?’) is a resident-led initiative which has taken Brazil by storm.

More is more: the gaudy genius of the late Deborah Sussman

2014-08-27T13:57:00-04:00

“More is more,” was the motto of Deborah Sussman, the graphic designer behind this brilliant visual riot, who died last week at the age of 82. Trained in the office of Charles and Ray Eames, she took their love of colour and pattern to new heights, establishing a studio with her husband, Paul Prejza, that would tackle everything from shop fit-outs to city wayfinding, sprinkling her distinctive brand, like sugary confetti, from Philadelphia to Santa Monica.

One week ago: Deborah Sussman, designer, has died at age 83

Chicago Mayor blasts Trump sign as 'tasteless'

2014-06-13T12:24:00-04:00

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin. “Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement.

Trump responds in his typical classy style...

Before I bought the site, the Sun Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2014

Signs from the near future

2014-06-05T14:44:00-04:00

A new Tumblr showcases predictions of signage in our future.

What Do Pedestrian Traffic Icons Say About Your Culture?

2013-10-15T14:03:00-04:00

From the sparsely dotted Chinese walking man to the top-hat-wearing, cane-bearing Dane, almost a hundred “walking men” are displayed life-size on banners that line the sidewalk. “It’s important to me that they are on human scale because they really represent us,” said Ms. Barkai. Only rarely are the icons depicted as women, she noted. Of the hundreds of images in her collection, Ms. Barkai has only “about six or seven women, mostly from European countries.”