Ms. Stauffacher-Solomon was the graphic designer for the project and worked on promotional materials and the Sea Ranch logo. She is shaped like an abstracted ram’s horns (broad, curly Y-shaped), each horn encircling the spiral shell of a nautilus, a homage to both land and earth. represents. She used to live on a sheep farm and then went to the sea.
Architects housed Sea Ranch’s athletic club, including tennis courts, pool, and locker rooms, inside a dog run to protect it from the wind. The interior walls were made of unfinished plywood, and as funds had run out, the interior was turned over to Ms. Stauffacher-Solomon. With the help of a local sign painter, she spent her three days creating a giant spatial illusion that included bold diagonals, circles, arrows, letters, and blocks of bull’s-eye color. “Make me happy, kid,” her contractor told her.
“Here we had authentic architecture that tried to blend in with the surrounding barns and landscape,” said Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA. Fletcher co-authored “Sea Ranches: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” with Joseph Becker. In 2018, he organized an exhibition with the same title. “And then Bobby painted the name of the development in bold Helvetica typeface on the exterior of the main lodge, and painted amazing graphics in the shower rooms of the athletic center, which probably drew the ire of architects and appeared on the covers of architecture magazines and magazines. It became an image.” This led to the beginning of environmental super graphics.
“Like Bobby, he was very smart, a little naughty and ahead of his time,” she added.
Ms. Stauffer Solomon’s work was featured on the cover of Progressive Architecture magazine. One of the magazine’s editors, C. Ray Smith, developed her paint-as-architecture movement after noticing that other designers and architects around the country were turning spaces upside down just like she was. and named it Super Graphics. In the era of Pop Art and Op Art, Smith wrote, supergraphics would “destroy architectural planes, distort corners, and explode the rectangular boxes we built as rooms.”
Sea Ranch became a pilgrimage site for architecture buffs and, inevitably, a community of expensive vacation homes. Ms. Stauffacher-Solomon often said, “Real estate won.” She also moved to projects in San Francisco, New York, and Europe.