Foreword
Moshe Safdie
Moshe Safdie is an architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author.
During his celebrated 50-year career, Safdie has explored the essential principles of socially responsible design with a distinctive visual language. Safdie’s global practice includes projects throughout North and South America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the developing world.
Projects span a wide range of typologies, including airports, museums, performing arts institutions, libraries, housing, mixed-use buildings, and entire cities. Safdie has authored four books and is a frequent essayist and lecturer.
I have been collaborating with Michael Gericke for many decades, on many projects, both personally and professionally. I would have thought that by now I would have a comprehensive knowledge of his work and that of his colleagues at Pentagram. Yet seeing Graphic Life is a revelation. Such is the value of monographs: putting together a life’s work, which can then be understood in its full complexity, richness, and diversity.
If I had to choose a single word to describe Michael’s work, I would say essence; Michael is the master at discovering the essence of whatever he is engaged in doing. The case studies on the following pages, many of which I’m familiar with, prove my point. Michael’s work in the realm of graphics, wayfinding, and signage could be considered by some to be a necessary, functional component of a design—an informative layer over the architecture, but also an element that stands on its own. What Michael has repeatedly and successfully achieved is making that layer an indispensable, integral component of the overall architectural and visual experience of a project. The work rises to a level where it becomes an added quality that you cannot imagine the place without it.
In the quest for this integration, time and again, Michael has succeeded in capturing the essence. The deep meaning is evident in the idea of a library that happens to be in a particular setting—say Salt Lake City; the essence of an airport, its dependence on wayfinding and signage, and yet also the essence of the spatial experience of the particular place—in Nordic Toronto; or, many miles away across the Pacific, the essence of a complex such as Marina Bay Sands, a microcosm of a city where graphics, signage, and informative material become the extension and celebration of the architecture itself. Like the flowers on a tree at the moment of blossoming, the choice of patterns, colors, and typography for the design of related elements all resonate with the setting. At Marina Bay Sands, Michael went well beyond graphics—he became an urbanist.
One can marvel at the contrasting and particular responses as well as the strategies that are applied. Consider, for example, Jewel at Changi Airport in Singapore and Titletown near Lambeau Field in Wisconsin. Both are in “nature settings.” Jewel is about subtleties, cohabitating graphics with the rich plant life, there, present, but just so. In contrast, Titletown’s graphics, inspired by Lambeau Field, become the entire environment and modulating space, defining the sports activities.
The same is true of Michael’s venture into the world of logos and symbol making—finding an appropriate graphic identity for institutions and for organizations. In this more abstract world of infinite possibilities and choices, we observe, over and over, Michael’s search for the essence—sometimes visual, sometimes literal—that somehow captures the spirit of what the organization or institution stands for. My favorites, among many, are the logos for AirTrain, the FIFA World Cup, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Super Bowl. There is a boldness that amplifies the message in a kind of musical way—expanded from an identity to become a color palette, a pattern, textures, and materials that transform the environment.
In Michael’s graphic world, it comes down, when all is said and done, to the eye. Michael’s eye is extraordinary. I have come to rely on it without question. Book design is a test and an opportunity for the eye; the selection, the cropping, and the juxtaposition of images. Each act has great impact on the message. In designing our own monograph, beginning with a cover, Michael zeroed in on two essential qualities that recur in the architecture: the manipulation of daylight and the ceremonial aspect of some of our institutional designs. Both were summed up in a single cover featuring four vertical strips of images. In presenting the projects, given our long collaboration, Michael developed the narrative and selected just the right images, juxtaposing them in a particular way as a master storyteller.
Similarly, the eye and storytelling are present in the many exhibitions Michael has designed. Unlike signage, the graphic representation becomes the prime experience. His exhibitions depend on the medium of narrative, the play between words, typography, images, and other forms of communication.
This combination of storytelling, identity making, and graphic power is also expressed in the many posters reproduced in the pages of Graphic Life. In the series designed for the American Institute of Architects, to single out just one, instant impact is achieved. We get it—with a smile.
I wish Michael and his team at Pentagram many more productive years. Let this Graphic Life be just the beginning.
Michael Gericke
As a graphic designer working in multiple dimensions, there is a thrill to spontaneously creating something in a few days that’s shot out instantly into the world, seen, and then gone. There’s also confidence and power in spending many months carefully shaping visual identities to distill big ideas into small yet hardworking icons and images that are spread far across popular culture through many mediums. Equally rewarding is working for years as a small member of large and complex teams to design lasting, sometimes essential, and hopefully memorable parts of places that will be with us for decades or more.
The opportunity to help someone, something, or somewhere, via design, is a window few have—to immerse yourself in so many different public and commercial worlds, cultures, and environments, to understand them deeply, then interpret them, and deliberately make them better.
Creating objects, tools, and moments that become a part of daily lives—it doesn’t matter if they are intended for tiny, extremely focused audiences and causes, or projects that reach many—is something that has always been a motivation for me. By using the simple elements of form, color, type, image, and message—combined as a unique alloy for each use—design becomes an ever-changing means to celebrate a place, tell a story, or create a recognizable symbol that is built with meaning.
Alan Fletcher, one of Pentagram’s founders, said, “Painters are concerned with solving their own problems, while designers are concerned with solving other people’s problems.” I’ve come to realize I like the challenge of solving other people’s problems and look forward to knowing that every one and every answer will always be different.
Many would say this work is a vehicle for a designer’s self-expression, via a client’s assignment and need. I find the “expression” ultimately comes from deeply understanding the context, expanding the parameters, observing as much as you can, challenging the given constraints, and asking a lot of questions.
Although the search for the valid idea requires endurance and rigor, eventually in that corner where you’ve carefully pushed it all, you will find something unexpected that appears naturally, fulfills a need, has order, and solves a problem.
However deliberate you are in asking the right questions and corralling everything you’ve discovered, finding an answer to a problem can be humbling and elusive. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler’s frequently quoted book, he describes how “bisociative thinking” can connect personal experiences, perceptions, and the unconscious, to fuel intuition. The creative act, he says, “does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills.” Invention or discovery is found by combining different ideas. Interestingly, the French theoretical mathematician Jacques-Salomon Hadamard noted that “the Latin verb cogito ‘to think’ etymologically means ‘to shake together.’ ”
I’ve found that once you’ve listened long enough, done your homework, looked, searched inside yourself, glanced away, and shaken it all up again, you begin to connect the pieces and discover something surprising that has the potential to serve its purpose.
Design is not a solo act. Solving meaningful problems usually does not happen alone. Working and collaborating with people you respect and who challenge you multiplies, by many factors, what you can do and accomplish.
I’ve been fortunate to have my partners and team, whose vast individual and collective experience offers a wide range of skills, insights, and disciplines, to be advisors, supportive critics, and, of course, designers.
Don Bilodeau, a long-standing associate and ever-present collaborator, has made invaluable contributions and truly shaped nearly every three-dimensional project on the following pages.
My long and valued relationships with many architects, especially Moshe Safdie and David Childs, as well as their partners, have guided me in countless ways. They have enabled me to contribute to the experiences they’ve envisioned and realized, as they capture the understanding of a project’s unique context, the quality of its culture, and the essence of its place.
I’ve found a graphic voice, like life, with many tones and inflections, can say quite a bit and tell quite a story.
