Anatomy of Design

15

ANATOMY OF DESIGN

The mammoth typographic messages covering every exterior inch of the New

Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) school in Newark, New Jersey,

transform a former Episcopal rectory, with all the charm of a reform school,

from bleak house to billboard palace. Paula Scher of Pentagram/New York

created a typographic language composed of bold gothic and slab serif letters,

audacious graphic images, and stark primary colors, underscored by irony and

humor, to landmark what in 2000 was a new wellspring of cultural activity in

a city that had fallen on hard times. While applying typography to architecture

is not new—look to the inscriptions on Trajan’s Column (A.D. 106–113) for the

source—Scher energized the current practice, informed by her many years as

a print publication designer.

“Cities are like magazines,” she explains. “There is advertising and

editorial that has to intermingle in an appropriate manner.” While on some

buildings the manner is subtler than others, Scher is an admited typographical

exhibitionist. So when the president of NJPAC asked her to “turn a dowdy old

building into something that’s bright and appropriate for a school for a

performing arts group,” out came the vintage type books and up went the

huge letters and words.

Scher took her cue from walls of old London theaters painted with

announcements and posted with bills. She was also smitten by photographs of

the façade for the Moscow department store GUM, designed in the 1920s by

avant-garde typographer Alexander Rodchenko, which made the entire structure

into a constructivist poster. Simply perusing old photographs of New York City’s

Times Square, where zoning laws have long required a sizable percentage of

building space devoted to “spectacular” advertisements, evidences how much

the past collides with Scher’s “big idea” to cover the entire NJPAC building—

from the two chimney towers to the protruding ventilation ducts—with words

and phrases like

music, dance, and theater. And she chose a nouveau Victorian

type style complemented by bright white, gray, and metallic hues for the sake

of visibility and aesthetics.

Supergraphics like these have indeed altered the aesthetics of the

street. Once ugly scaffolding around building construction or renovation sites is

routinely rented out for mammoth advertising scrims and banners, and

increasingly public space artists—influenced or seduced by these advertising

techniques—have used the venue for artistic messages. Yet building exteriors

are not the designer’s sole canvas. For NJPAC, Scher made the interior space

fulfill the promise of the outside message by designing a complementary

scheme with the cheapest institutional tiles and paint in bright, primary de

Stijl–influenced colors—red, yellow, and green—on the floor in alternating striped

patterns. The walls were painted white, the doorframes black, and all the doors

were done in different primary colors, infusing the building with a sense of

play. Scher likens it to a book jacket design, “except it’s a floor.”

Environmental typography informs, decorates, and celebrates ideas or

events. Barbara Kruger painted type on walls, floor, and ceiling, transforming a

gallery space into a typographical manifesto; Stephen Doyle applied type to

floors and walls as though the surfaces were a form of a two-dimensional

sculpture. And speaking of two dimensions, type is frequently contorted and

stretched on posters and other print materials to approximate three-

dimensional architectural structures, as pictorial puns that convey two

simultaneous messages. Scher’s NJPAC proves that a building can not only

house but can be art and design, advertisement and manifesto, sculpture and

architecture, all under one roof.

New Jersey Performing Arts Center

Designer: Paula Scher

2003 New Jersey Performing Arts Center

d: Paula Scher s: Pentagram c: NJPAC

1. Building

2. Posters

3. Interior signage

Exterior architectural type treatments

Interior architectural type treatments

Type creating illusion of space

1991 All Violence Is the Illustration of a

Pathetic Stereotype

exhibition

a:Barbara Kruger

Interior view of exhibition “Barbara Kruger,”

Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Photo by

Dorothy Zeidman, Fremont.

1996 19th Amendment

ad:Stephen Doyle ad:D

c:New York State Divis

undated The Bonhomme a Laigle buildings in

France façade treatment

p:Massin

1995 Pieces From the Editing Floor

CD cover for Mondo Grosso

ad:Hideki Nakajima s:Nakajima Design, Ltd.

1997 Horst Schafer poster

d:Pierre Mendell

s:Studio Mendell & Oberer

1999 R

Soda fa

ad,d:Jun

c:Ruby

1977 Guggenheim Museum poster

d:Ivan Chermayeff

1957 Renault Dauphine poster

d:Herbert Leupin

1999 Signage for Volharding

Building, The Hague building fa

d:Lust c:Wils&Co, Architectura

Platform of the Hague

1997 Esisar Valence signage

d:Ruedi Baur c:DDE de la Drome,

rectorat de l'academie de Grenoble,

Drac Rhone-Alpes

Design of the façade and signage for the

Esisar school.

1996 The Veenman Printers building, Ede,

The Netherlands façade treatment

s:Neutelings Riedijk

Façade design for the Veenman Printworks

building, Ede, Netherlands featuring typography

by Karel Martens.

1955 Land's End façade treatment

The sign reads: “First to Last House in England.”

1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream

building signage

With the gloom of the economic slump

during the Great Depression, theatres

went to lengths to attract patrons.

1928 Spies façade decoration

d:Rudi Feld c:Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin

The entrance of the Ufa-Palast am Zoo fantastic

searchlight eyes roll and magically illuminate the

suggestive title Spione/Spies.

1924 Mosselprom's headquarters

façade decoration

d:Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander

Rodchenko

1998 Die Pr’a’sidentinnen poster

d:Gunter Rambow