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Paper written for D-Crit Course Architecture and Urban Design Criticism, instructed by Alexandra Lange, Fall 2008
A Bad Type Idea Is a Worse Architectural Ideal
Frederico Duarte
Ramses the Great, the Republic of Venice, Napoleon III, John D. Rockefeller Jr, the
University of Harvard. The history of architecture can also be read as the history of its
commissioners—from small renovations of private buildings to the capitals of nations,
visionary patrons have for millennia relied on architects to erect the physical, inhabitable
manifestations of their might, fortune, ambition and ideology. In many cases however,
these built manifestations of intent fail to meet the expectations of both client and
architect: circumstances of time, money, space and other shortcomings are usually to
blame. But often a dearth of vision or dedication to an idea—or an ideal—by any of the
parts, removes from a work of architecture any kind of significance to the society of its
present and the history of its future. Such is the case of the Sheila C. Johnson Design
Center, a Lyn Rice Architects (LRA) project for Parsons the New School of Design, in
New York City.
This lobby, auditorium, archive, gallery and meeting room complex is, since early 2008,
the school’s new urban showcase. According to a recent press release, it underscores the
New School’s “commitment to the new”: a lengthy enumeration of the facility’s features,
this press release fails to include one important element of the Center’s design that can
also be easily overlooked in an architecture review. Although typography can be seen as
something foreign to both the practice and critique of the discipline, in this case it
deserves closer inspection and scrutiny. An analysis of typography in this project is
relevant due to its sheer physical presence in the space, but also because of the process
behind its selection and implementation, which speaks volumes about the architects’
dedication to an idea, but even more about the relations between design, architect and
commissioner.
I didn’t make much of it on my first visit to the Center: I was there to see “the
architecture”. The new space seemed a clear improvement from what was there
before—the school longed for something new, and the architects delivered. My personal
highlights were the new bay windows bringing the street inside, the padded walls of the
archive and the clever cable solution in the gallery, which allows for long cables to be
hidden from visitors’ sight, while being easily accessible to technicians. But there were
already signs in the building that “new” was no longer great: messy scribbles on the
auditorium slate wall; a critique wall not moving as it should; the three “super-sized
graphic” walls and the complex process of selection and public exhibition of student
work they entail. All this made me question the intention vs. the application of some of
the building’s features. Such was also the case of the bark wall; initially planned as a
“vertical garden wall” to be designed by the French architect Patrick Blanc, it was
rejected by one of the School’s board members. Another wall of the lobby was to have an
artwork by Ben Rubin (of New York Times’ building lobby fame) but was left blank. The
typography, and particularly the typeface used in the building, may have also been, like
these two examples, a symptom of the architects’ intent not matching by the
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Paper written for D-Crit Course Architecture and Urban Design Criticism, instructed by Alexandra Lange, Fall 2008
commissioner’s agenda—or vice-versa. Or was it?
an only-readable-from-below-canopy instead of the big-letter-sign one could expect.
Inside, the names of rooms —or rather, the names of the people who paid for them—are
found embossed in plaster, cut in MDF or inlayed in bamboo and grey fabric. There are
also fluorescent yellow vinyl letters and numbers on glass panes. The whole thing is full
of type, and it’s all clad in one typeface: Impact. Designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and
re-released by Microsoft in 1996, Impact is today one of the most (over?) used typefaces
in the world, together with Comic Sans, Arial, Curlz, and other fonts that come free with
any computer operating systems. It is available to anyone with a personal computer and
can be found from bunion therapy ads on the subway to thousands of MySpace pages.
And there is nothing wrong with that: we all live in a free, typographically democratic
society after all.
Impact is also a favorite among architecture students. They love using it against
renderings of their projects—the ones with jerky, badly photoshopped photos of catwalk
models for scale—which can be found in every architecture school, including Parsons.
LRA, too, love a bit of Impact: from the section dividers of their website to the plans,
renderings and the actual Sheila C. Johnson Design Center building, they use it
everywhere. But why here? Of all the thousands of typefaces created by experienced,
talented type designers, why did LRA use not a cheap, but a free font in this building? A
free, poorly designed typeface for such an important project and such a meaningful
client—a design school, where typography is not only appreciated, but also taught?
Following my visit, I asked Astrid Lipka of LRA if there was a particular reason behind
its use. According to her, Impact’s “thick and parallel strokes, compressed letter spacing
and minimal counter-form” make it “a very architectural font”. This sounds reasonable,
but in a project where typography visibly plays such an important role, should architects
really be choosing the typeface? Isn’t this something graphic designers, even type
designers, should be entrusted with? When asked if LRA worked with a
graphic/typographic consultant, Lipka replied: “We did not have a graphic consultant. In
this case a lot of the graphics are not so much pure and applied graphics, as they are
architectural elements.”
This answer would make most graphic designers cringe in revolt: How come Impact, the
heavy font of the masses, the ugly typeface of desktop publishing and silly blogs (it’s the
lolcats font!), reemerges in Parsons as the ultimate “architectural element”? One would
hope LRA could have used it as a poignant comment to the pervasiveness of Impact in
21st century vernacular graphics, or for any other clever reason a design critic could think
of. But they just like it, didn’t look any farther, and went with it. Their client also went
along with it, even when The New School had its whole visual identity redesigned in
2006 by the branding consultancy Siegel and Gale. The new logotype uses the typeface
ITC Franklin Gothic to unite all its schools under one consistent brand: Parsons,
concerned with the future (and present) typographic discrepancy in the building, then
asked LRA to consider using this typeface instead of Impact. LRA not only didn’t change
their minds, but convinced their client to trust their graphic instinct: “I believe it does not
Paper written for D-Crit Course Architecture and Urban Design Criticism, instructed by Alexandra Lange, Fall 2008
hurt to inject some variation and to create a slightly modified graphic identity at the
Johnson Design Center—its own strong identity - as opposed to being too much of a
‘branded space’”, said Lipka. But where does “space identity” end and “branded space”
begin?
The use of typography by LRA in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center highlights two
main issues. First, architects should not be handling type in the first place. They should
be aware of their limitations, and work with better-qualified professionals in order to
collaboratively create a solution that better expresses the client’s intent. It’s not that LRA
successful architect-graphic designer collaborations—such as Garth Walker’s custom
typeface for Urban Solutions + OMM Design Workshop’s Constitutional Court in Lucent
Technologies Center for Arts Education—prove that architects can play well with others.
LRA do not. By working on their own and ignoring other design disciplines, they not just
made a mediocre design gesture and post-justified it to the school board. They sent the
worst possible message to designers and architects, professionals and students, inside and
outside Parsons.
Secondly, the whole process exposes the shortsightedness of the Center’s own
commissioner. Instead of —as stated in that seemingly innocuous press release, but aren’t
these things declarations of intent?—underscoring The New School’s “commitment to
the new”, Parsons visibly has no idea of what it wants to commit to. So instead of
boasting an innovative, inspiring typographical addition to its new building, it accepts, as
part of its built ideal, a mere architectural afterthought. It gained a new, shiny, impactful
(pun intended) “urban quadrangle”, but lost a (historic?) chance to express an idea, a
vision, of what it has been teaching for over 100 years. Parsons too didn’t see, or go, far
enough in its commitment to an ideal: instead of championing design (architectural,
product, communication, fashion, et al) as the ultimate collaborative, inclusive, forwardthinking discipline of the 21st century, it seems to still foster a profession tied to
hierarchy, superficial knowledge and ego. If the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center ever
makes architecture history, it will do so with a bitter footnote.