Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s Utopia Myopia

In Utopia Myopia (2013), graphic designer, landscape architect, and artist Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b. 1928) turns the codex into a playground for wide-ranging linguistic and typographic experiments. Billed as a collection of plays, “a kind of a novel novel,” and “an arty academic adult comic book,” Utopia Myopia is also a tongue-in-cheek critique of modern design standards. Stauffacher Solomon transforms each page into a stage, typically introduced with the four-line block: “SETTING / A piece of paper. / Here. / Now.” Ludwig Wittgenstein and Anderson Cooper converse through jumbotrons superimposed atop Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International; disembodied dancers’ legs discuss Albert Bierstadt’s romantic paintings of the American West; and Hollywood palm trees and angels chat about L.A. billboards, “architecture-as-an-ad,” and Learning from Las Vegas, a classic 1972 text of postmodern architectural theory.

Charting the misguided utopian dreams of modern artists, architects, and designers, Utopia Myopia serves not only as a fantastical history book of West Coast design but also as an autobiographical reflection. From her early training as a dancer in California to her graphic design studies in Basel and her later disillusionment with the power structures of modernism, Stauffacher Solomon uses Utopia Myopia’s thirty-six plays to trace her own “illusions, confusions, and conclusions” over her long career in graphic design and architecture.^[1] Divided into two acts by an “intermission” spread, Stauffacher Solomon’s plays progress thematically, exploring topics from utopian city planning to Old Hollywood cinema. Legible primarily to designers and design aficionados, Stauffacher Solomon’s reference-laden scripts can at times read as self-indulgent—a series of in-jokes for industry insiders—but her zany wit tempers her encyclopedic ambitions. She assembles a playful critique of modernism’s egalitarian ideals, poking fun at the lionization of figures like Le Corbusier, Rudolph Schindler, and “Adolf ‘Decoration-is-a-Crime’ Loos” as she examines how modernist aesthetics found their primary use polishing corporate images.

Stauffacher Solomon’s critique of the modernist canon extends from Utopia Myopia’s texts to its visual form. Rooted in centuries of tradition, the codex is arguably one of the most conservative forms of media, but to Stauffacher Solomon, it presents an opportunity for rebellion. As if rebuking the book designer’s obsession with harmonious page proportions, Stauffacher Solomon embraces the 8.5-by-11-inch sheet—that most standard of standard formats, almost comically commonplace and insistently practical. The purview of offices and schools, the letter-size page lives outside the world of professional design. Its very banality lends Stauffacher Solomon’s plays a certain deadpan humor, offering a fitting setting for her experiments with the conventions of bookmaking.

Purists have traditionally subscribed to typography scholar Beatrice Warde’s belief that “printing should be invisible”—the book designer is not an artist, and their labor should be carefully concealed.^[2] Just as a “crystal goblet” showcases fine wine, the page should merely act as a transparent vessel for text. But where Warde’s devotees see form as a servant to content, Stauffacher Solomon turns form into content itself.

Limiting herself to the same visual vocabulary as modernist masters, Stauffacher Solomon transforms restrictions into interventions, at once invoking and subverting the rigors of so-called “good” design. Helvetica, long an emblem of modernism’s moral ambitions toward truth and honesty, takes on a new tenor in Stauffacher Solomon’s hands—noise, shadows, and other artifacts of the photocopier are left adamantly visible, dismantling Warde’s ideals of “crystalline” printing and laying bare a laborious process of composition and production. The self-referential play “Heaven Sent Helvetica” takes her critique from subtext to text: satirizing aspirations toward perfect clarity, Stauffacher Solomon presents a cloud speaking with its creations, a Helvetica O and U, about this “visual revolution. / The end of illusions. / No more confusion.”

Bucking the Helvetica rulebook, Stauffacher Solomon pairs her anti-crystalline printing with unorthodox typesetting.^[3] Rather than follow her former teacher Armin Hofmann’s preference for asymmetrical layouts and title-case headers, she adopts a centered logic and sticks to all-caps title settings. “Good Armin might hate my new stuff,” Stauffacher Solomon notes in the interview that concludes Utopia Myopia, “but he’d probably smile at me and say nothing.”

Taking aim at the very heart of systematic design, Stauffacher Solomon questions the supremacy of the grid itself. Typically no more than a hidden skeleton, the grid promises to rationalize layouts with mathematical justification for the placement of copy or image. For Stauffacher Solomon, though, this invisible tool becomes an active player: red pencil lines establish an ever-present radial grid that hovers between functional tool and fanciful drawing. In some plays, content respectfully snaps to Stauffacher Solomon’s red guidelines; in others, it defiantly peeks over them; and in others still, the grid transforms into its own pictorial space. Secondary grids in “A Play on Wordplay,” for instance, turn into perspective lines, establishing horizons for rows of palm trees. Taking on a life of its own, the grid morphs from a rigorous measuring device into a free agent, interacting directly with the figures and landscapes of Stauffacher Solomon’s absurdist collages.

Implicit in these irreverent layouts is an insistence that no design can be universally clear; ostensibly neutral designs are culturally specific constructions, shaped by the conditions of their production and transmission. The transparent vessel that claims to transcend time and place is just as embedded in mass culture as television or film—an assumption Stauffacher Solomon explores through her dreamlike collages of found materials and original drawings. Extending her notion of the page as a stage, she treats design as a spectacle: Baroque theater sets play host to letterforms and landscapes, while jumbotrons merge with buildings and bodies. Riffing on the idea of the “starchitect,” Stauffacher Solomon conflates the cult of celebrity around Hollywood stars and the idolization of modern architects. In “Utopia Made in Hollywood #1,” a hulking figure looms over a Hollywood boulevard as a billboard-style jumbotron perches on its shoulders broadcasting Marilyn Monroe. Turn the page and Marilyn is gone; in her stead is a white-box building on stilts, perhaps a rendition of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s iconic Villa Savoye.^[4] Shrouded in rationalized geometric forms, a Le Corbusier home or a Hofmann poster may look so logical that it seems natural, but what about when you peel back the curtain? “Invisible design is power,” claims a character in “Playing on a Page.” It is “strongest when the powerbroker isn’t seen, best when it’s as light as the laughter of friendship.” Stauffacher Solomon chooses to place the powerbroker front and center.^[5] Exposing the tools in the typographer’s bag, she positions design as a calculated arrangement of “lines & lies & clues”—always constructed, always flawed, and always biased. To think otherwise is utopia myopia.

• (1)

  A conversation between the artist and Adrian Shaughnessy is included at the end of Utopia Myopia, acting as a postscript to Stauffacher Solomon’s plays. Here, Stauffacher Solomon reflects on her text as a diary—“illusions, confusions, and conclusions flying from my fingertips onto the page.”

• (2)

  In her 1930 speech “Printing Should Be Invisible”—later reproduced in print as “The Crystal Goblet”—Warde advocated for “crystal clear” typography. Warde’s promotion of “invisible” printing shaped the field of graphic design in the twentieth century, particularly influencing standards for book typography. See Beatrice Warde, “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should Be Invisible,” in The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography, ed. Henry Jacob (London: The Sylvan Press, 1955), pp. 11–17.

• (3)

  Conventions for the “correct” use of type had been codified in texts like Armin Hofmann’s 1965 Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Practice, Emil Ruder’s 1967 Typography: A Manual of Design, and Josef Müller-Brockmann’s 1981 Grid Systems in Graphic Design. Stauffacher Solomon would likely have been intimately familiar with such texts, which were influential in both professional practice and pedagogy.

• (4)

  Constructed between 1928 and 1931, Villa Savoye is a single-family home in Poissy, France. In 1932, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson included the Villa Savoye in their Museum of Modern Art exhibition Modern Architecture, cementing its place as a quintessential example of what they termed “International Style” architecture. The new style was defined by volumetric forms stripped of ornamentation and executed with strict attention to proportions and materials. See Henry-Russell Hitchcock et al., Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932).

• (5)

  In the years following Utopia Myopia’s publication, Stauffacher Solomon continued to explore the idea of “making the invisible visible,” even dedicating a 2019 artists’ book to the subject. See Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Making the Invisible Visible (San Francisco: Owl Cave Books, 2019).