Yale Architecture Posters in Creativity

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Viva ‘Las Vegas’

In 1968, the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took a group of their students from the Yale School of Architecture on an expedition to Las Vegas to study the realities of contemporary American architecture. What they discovered, and documented, was spontaneous, messy, and commercial, built for cars and big signs. The resulting manifesto, Learning From Las Vegas, written with Steven Izenour and published in 1972, helped shift the focus of American architectural thought away from rigid Modernism to more varied points of view. Tonight Venturi and Scott Brown will present the keynote address at “Architecture After Las Vegas,” a major symposium on the legacy of this seminal work. The conference coincides with the exhibition What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates, on view at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery through 5 February. “We may need these two architects as much now as ever,” declared New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review of the show.

Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig extend Pentagram’s series of posters for Yale Architecture, now in its twelfth year, with one that, like all the others, is primarily typographic and entirely black and white—but with a Rat Pack twist. Download a copy here.

Michael Bierut’s ‘Paper Architecture’ at Syracuse University

Paper Architecture: Posters by Michael Bierut opens at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture tomorrow, Thursday, 5 November. The exhibition is the first devoted to Bierut’s poster design and features 28 works from 1983 to the present for clients including the Architecture League of New York, the Yale School of Architecture, the New York State Council for the Arts and the University of Cincinnati. Bierut and his team are currently designing the environmental graphics for Syracuse’s Connective Corridor project linking the university to downtown. The exhibition is on view at Syracuse Architecture’s Slocum Hall Gallery through January 22.

New Work: Architectural League of New York

In September the Architectural League of New York relocated to a new home at 594 Broadway in Soho. And it’s not stopping there: to celebrate the move, the League is staging its fall programs and events all over town. Michael Bierut and Jennifer Kinon’s poster for the fall season uses the event locations to create a typographic map inspired by Don Page’s design for the 1969 Plan for New York and the utopian typography of Paolo Soleri. Download a PDF of the poster here.

New Work: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Harry Pearce and Jason Ching have designed a series of posters for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime that highlight the relative merits of drug treatment and rehabilitation around the world. The posters are a training tool specifically aimed at the Russian police, whose country has a particularly poor track record in drug treatment. The posters had to be eye-catching, easy to absorb and not reliant on language. The typographic solution built a simple world map from internationally recognised country abbreviation codes (GB, US, RU, etc). Eight variants were then designed, using colour coding and icons to provide comparative statistics around drug abuse, the incidence of HIV, Methadone and opioid maintenance therapies, and needle and syringe programmes.

Harry previously designed a series of mugs for the initiative.

A look at the posters after the jump.

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New Work: Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts

A major solo exhibition of Anish Kapoor, one of the world’s most influential artists, opened this past weekend at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor, known for his monumental public sculptures in cities around the world, is the first living artist to be exhibited in the entire main floor of the academy.

The visual identity for the exhibition, including posters, banners and other collateral, was designed by Harry Pearce and Associate Jason Ching in close collaboration with Anish Kapoor and the RA. Central to the identity is an image from Kapoor’s Shooting into the Corner, created by a cannon shooting red wax up against the walls and floor of the gallery space.

The exhibition remains on view until 11 December. Images of the campaign after the jump.

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Designers Celebrate London in Posters at the V&A

As part of this year’s London Design Festival, Domenic Lippa worked with the Festival’s Chairman, Sir John Sorrell, in curating the London Poster Project, a poster exhibition by 20 of the leading UK graphic designers and typographers including Tom Hingston, Frith Kerr, Alan Kitching, Fuel, Jonathan Ellery and Pentagram’s own Angus Hyland. Lippa commissioned the designers to produce a poster in red and black only that celebrates London as the creative capital of the world. Each silkscreened A1 poster was produced in limited edition of 100, 50 of which are available through the website Blanka. All 20 posters can be seen in the exhibition, which opened Saturday, 19 September and remains on view through 27th September at the Sackler Centre at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Several posters after the jump.

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New Work: London Design Festival 2009

The London Design Festival opened this past weekend, kicking off a week of over 163 exhibitions and 42 one-day events showcasing the city’s best in architecture, art, craft and product, graphic and digital design. For the third year running Domenic Lippa and his team have worked with the LDF to produce everything from t-shirts, bags, invitations, posters and postcards, through to the guide, signage and displays. This year’s theme of “Be Bold, Make a Statement” reflects the Festival’s stance that good design, even in difficult times, will always stand out. This year’s identity uses quotes from famous designers, including Pentagram co-founder Alan Fletcher.

This year the festival has worked closely with the V&A, which has become the hub venue and home to numerous installations, exhibitions and talks. These include a poster exhibition curated by Lippa that features work by 20 London designers, including our own Angus Hyland, and a talk by talk by New York partner Abbott Miller on the 24th.

As part of this growing annual event the team also worked on support material for the London Design Medal, as well as creating a new logo for the London Design Embassy. A look at some of the materials from this year’s program after the jump.

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Harry Pearce Designs Posters to Train the Russian Police

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Preview: Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Throughout the past year, we have been refreshing the identity of Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Pentagram’s relationship with the Cathedral, an extraordinary New York institution, goes back ten years. We designed its previous identity in 1999. Shortly after 9/11, the Cathedral was severely damaged by fire; a painstaking seven-year restoration followed, and the interior was reopened to great acclaim last November. The updated identity, which has been slowly introduced over the past few months, builds on the success of the reopening.

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