New at Pentagram
New Work: The Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago recently opened its Modern Wing, a stunning 264,000 square foot expansion designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. The wing is devoted to the museum’s modern and contemporary art, photography and design collections. The Art Institute has long been one of the world’s great encyclopedic museums, and the addition of the wing officially makes it the second-largest art museum in the U.S. As part of the expansion Abbott Miller was commissioned to create a new identity for the museum as well as a comprehensive program of interior and exterior environmental graphics.
New Work: California Academy of Sciences
On September 27th, the California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, reopened in an iconic new building designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. In the 154 years since the Academy’s founding, science museums have evolved far beyond the Victorian-era cabinet of curiosities. The $488 million, all-green, LEED® Platinum Certified building not only physically represents a new chapter in the institution’s long history, but celebrates a new kind of museum experience—one that is dynamic, thriving, interconnected and all about the natural world. The new Academy is, uniquely, a natural history museum, aquarium, planetarium and four-story rainforest, all under one living roof. And Kit Hinrichs and Laura Scott have designed a program of identity, environmental graphics and collateral print materials that definitively rebrand the institution as a vibrant, living museum.
Sign of the Times
Pentagram-designed New York Times sign recently installed on the paper’s new headquarters.
Last week, the Times Square district gained its latest sign as the logo of the New York Times was installed on the Eighth Avenue facade of its new Renzo Piano-designed headquarters tower.
But what looks like a simple sign—if a 110-foot-long logo set as a 10,116-point version of the newspaper’s iconic Fraktur font can be called simple—is actually an intricate assemblage of nearly a thousand separate custom-designed pieces, each a painted extruded aluminum sleeve a little more than three inches in diameter.
The story of how and why Pentagram came to design the sign after the jump.
New Work: The Morgan Library & Museum
Identity on glass at the new Madison Ave. entrance
Michael Bierut and his team have designed the identity, exhibition graphics and signage for the renamed Morgan Library & Museum, the New York institution that reopens tomorrow with a dramatic expansion by celebrated architect Renzo Piano. The new identity utilizes a single font called Dante, a serif typeface that is customarily used for books.
More images coming soon. Complete press release at the jump.
Update: The Morgan identity is noted on Unbeige.
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