# Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

Barbara Ethel Stauffacher Solomon (née Levé; December 5, 1928 – May 7, 2024) was an American landscape architect and graphic designer. She was best known for her large-scale interior 'supergraphics' and the exterior signs at Sea Ranch, a private estate with a Utopian vision in Sonoma County, California.

## Early life and education

Barbara Ethel Levé was born on December 5, 1928 in San Francisco, California to Fred Levé and Lilian Reinhertz Levé. She was a third-generation San Franciscan. Her father, Fred was a lawyer who represented anarchists. Her parents separated when she was 4 years old. As a young woman, Barbara Levé studied dance and worked as a dancer, as well as, studying painting and sculpture at San Francisco Art Institute.
At age 20, she married the filmmaker Frank Stauffacher in 1948. The designer and printmaker Jack Stauffacher became her brother-in-law through this marriage. Frank and Barbara Stauffacher had a daughter named Chloe.
In 1956, after the death of her husband, Barbara Stauffacher moved to Basel, Switzerland to study graphic design at the Basel Art Institute, where she was a student of Armin Hofmann until 1959. She had made the decision to study graphic design because she knew she could make a living in that field. She later studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and was graduated in 1981, writing her thesis on Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden.
In 1969, she married Daniel Solomon, an architect and professor. Their daughter, Nellie King Solomon, also became an artist and has showed her work at exhibitions with Stauffacher Solomon.

## Career

Stauffacher Solomon returned to San Francisco in 1962 and set up her graphic design studio. During that period of her career, she designed the monthly program guides for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Stauffacher Solomon met landscape architect Lawrence Halprin in 1968 and he employed her at Sea Ranch, a novel condominium development along ten miles of the California coast in Sonoma County. Initially, she designed the architectural scale paintings for the building interiors. Her work at Sea Ranch grew from her vocabulary of signs to creating motion and an awareness of space throughout the project. She created the logo for the Sea Ranch that drew from Swiss design and California impressionism to interpret the rams and crashing waves associated with the massive property. Halprin went on to recommend her to other architects in the San Francisco area who gave her a free rein in the creation of designs that exhibited her talent. She went on to receive two American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards for her work at Sea Ranch.
Stauffacher Solomon was an instructor at both Harvard University and Yale University during her career. While at Yale, an architect she had met during her work at Sea Ranch, Charles Moore, invited her to lead a studio project on supergraphics in 1968. The studio was a week-long project creating two-dimensional graphics that reinforced the architecture of the Yale University Art and Architecture elevators. Her studio project was wildly successful and heralded by Ada Louise Huxtable as a protest against "the establishment".
In the short period of its existence as a magazine, Stauffacher Solomon was art director of Scanlan's Monthly from 1970 until 1971.
In 1995, she designed a large outdoor art installation, Promenade Ribbon, for San Francisco. In 2002, Stauffacher Solomon was a member of the San Francisco Art Commission. In 2015, Stauffacher Solomon worked as a landscape architect and continued to create large scale graphic interventions outdoors.
Stauffacher Solomon is the author of the autobiographic book Why? Why not?. In 2016, Stauffacher Solomon was featured in the eighth book from Hall of Femmes featuring women in art direction and design.

## Death

Stauffacher Solomon died in San Francisco on May 7, 2024, at the age of 95.

## Exhibitions

Drawings and supergraphics by Stauffacher Solomon have been included in a number of museum exhibitions. In 2018, she created the supergraphic installation entitled Land(e)scape 2018 at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2019, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
From March to May 2021, another solo show of the work of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, entitled Green Rectangle of Paradise (GROP), was held at Gallery Van Bartha in Basel. The show was curated by Matylda Krzykowski and showcased more than forty drawings and paintings by the artist, dating from 1980s to 2021. Krzykowski had introduced Stauffacher Solomon to the gallery.

## Books

* Green Architecture: Notes on the Common Ground (Design quarterly 120), 1982.
* Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden, 1988. ISBN 0847809072
* Good Mourning California (1 ed.). New York, New York: Rizzoli International Publishers. 1992. ISBN 978-0847815425.
* Why? Why Not?, 2013. ISBN 9780988554627
* Utopia Myopia, 2013. ISBN 9780988554610