Regionalism in Graphic Design

Running Header: REGIONALISM IN GRAPHIC DESIGN 1

Regionalism in Graphic Design

A Case Study in Event Design: the 2010 International Viola Congress

A thesis submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Design

in the School of Design

of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning

2013

by

Darrin Scott Hunter

B.Arch., University of Cincinnati, 1997

Committee: J. A. Chewning (Chair, DAAP), Catharine Carroll (CCM)

REGIONALISM IN GRAPHIC DESIGN 2

Abstract

Regionalism arose in the 1980s as a design theory meant to address growing discomfort

with perceived placelessness and lack of identity in modernist and postmodernist architecture.

The modernist movement’s original ideals were to create environments that improved the

quality of life for everyone using universal design principles which could ostensibly be employed

anywhere with equal success. But many theorists have rightly pointed to the modernist project’s

failure to create such universal places that are also affordable, humane, and relevant to local

cultures. It is a question, in the words of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, of “how to become

modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in

universal civilization.” Even though a great deal of inquiry from various writers and

practitioners benefits the field of architecture, almost nothing has been written about how to

promote regionalism as a basis for resistant critical practice for visual communicators. In short,

there is no theory of regionalism for graphic designers.

This research attempts to lay modest groundwork for regionalist practice in graphic

design, including discussion of a specific case study: the design of event graphics for the 2010

International Viola Congress held at the University of Cincinnati. Graphic design at first appears

to be resistant to such ideas, given that its lifeblood tends to be the visual planning of mass

distributed and increasingly digital media products for companies who carefully cultivate

universally extensible and placeless “brand space” that is indifferent to geographic and cultural

barriers. What is needed to formulate a critical regionalist practice are ways for graphic design

to be rooted in a specific place (“sited”) while still harnessing the power of mass

communications and serving client needs.


Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the faculty members at the University of Cincinnati who

helped to shape and guide my graduate studies, foremost my thesis committee: J.

Chewning as chair from DAAP’s School of Design along with Catharine Carroll,

professor of viola at CCM. J’s mentorship to myself and all the graduate students

through his seminars was invaluable, and this thesis project would never have happened

without Catharine’s trust in my undertaking such a large design project for CCM single-

handedly.

I was also lucky to participate as an assistant in grant-funded research projects

with Brian Davies, Valerie Kremer, and Ericka Hedgecock in areas directly related to my

interests—a pleasure and rare luxury for a graduate student. I thank Dennis Puhalla for

lending wise ears and eyes through numerous long, waxing, and philosophical

discussions about design (and for publishing the IVC cover!) Thanks to Kristin Cullen

for her perky chats and brilliant typography instruction (I still want to be a roadie on the

Design Is Pretty Tour), and to Robert Probst for our summer of fun with Abraham. And

finally, thanks to my partner, Roger, for great company on the long journey.


Table of Contents

Chapter one: Introduction ................................................................ 11

Context and scope of the thesis ........................................................................................ 11 Goals and Outcomes ........................................................................................................ 16

Chapter two: Modernism and regionalism in graphic design ............ 18

Groundwork: From the “modern” forward ..................................................................... 18 Corporate rootlessness and Ralph Nader ....................................................................... 21 Authenticity and simulation ............................................................................................ 25 Genius loci: History + memory + space = place ............................................................. 28 Brand spaces versus real places ...................................................................................... 30 Elements of regional graphic design ............................................................................... 33 Becoming sited: The quest for identity in place ............................................................. 40

Chapter three: PRINT’s Regional Design Annual ............................. 43

Short history of the Annual ............................................................................................. 43 Summary of regional differences, 1981–1999................................................................. 47 Critique of the 2005 Annual: Lorraine Wild ................................................................... 50

Chapter four: Case study—International Viola Congress 2010 ......... 68

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 68 Concept and content development .................................................................................. 69 Collateral materials design .............................................................................................. 94

Chapter five: Methods for the regionalist graphic designer ............. 196

“Regional design aware of itself” ................................................................................... 196 Sited content and authorship ........................................................................................ 199 Strategies for building regional design awareness ........................................................ 211 Shifting priorities of the regionalist graphic designer .................................................. 239 What does “regional” graphic design look like? ........................................................... 240

Appendix: Literature reference ..................................................... 246

Literature Overview ....................................................................................................... 246 Vincent Canizaro ............................................................................................................ 247 Paul Ricoeur ................................................................................................................... 252 Wendell Berry ................................................................................................................ 255 Michael Benedikt ........................................................................................................... 257 Kenneth Frampton ........................................................................................................ 261 Lucy Lippard .................................................................................................................. 266 Barbara Allen ................................................................................................................. 271


List of figures

Figure 1: Aerial view of Paris .................................................................................................................................. 35 Figure 2: Similar balcony railings geo-located throughout Paris ..........................................................................36 Figure 3: Similar balcony across cities eliminates it as a distinctly ‘regional’ detail ............................................. 37 Figure 4: PRINT magazine Regional Design Annual covers, 1996-2006 ..............................................................43 Figure 5: First PRINT RDA cover, 1981 ................................................................................................................. 44 Figure 6: PRINT RDA 1981, Midwest - Minnesota ............................................................................................... 46 Figure 7: PRINT Regional Design Annual 2005, Minnesota ................................................................................. 52 Figure 8: PRINT Regional Design Annual 2005, Wisconsin ................................................................................. 54 Figure 9: CCM village at night, site of IVC 2010 ................................................................................................... 69 Figure 10: Cincinnati Bengals football stadium ..................................................................................................... 71 Figure 11: Rome’s Coliseum .................................................................................................................................... 71 Figure 12: CCM’s skylight ‘oculis’ ........................................................................................................................... 72 Figure 13: Rome’s Pantheon with oculis ................................................................................................................ 72 Figure 14: CCM’s new plaza grand stair ................................................................................................................. 73 Figure 15: Rome’s Campidoglio .............................................................................................................................. 73 Figure 16: CCM - old and new literally connected .................................................................................................. 75 Figure 17: CCM plaza above substructure parking ................................................................................................. 76 Figure 18: CCM village in UC campus context ....................................................................................................... 77 Figure 19: CCM Werner Recital Hall lobby ............................................................................................................ 78 Figure 20: CCM Alumni Garden ............................................................................................................................. 78 Figure 21: Old reflected in new outside Mary Emery Hall ..................................................................................... 79 Figure 22: Old framed by the new above Werner Hall ........................................................................................... 79 Figure 23: Werner Recital Hall interior ................................................................................................................ 80 Figure 24: CCM auditorium / classroom ............................................................................................................... 80 Figure 25: Main Corbett Auditorium interior ....................................................................................................... 80 Figure 26: Corbett Auditorium lobby .................................................................................................................... 80 Figure 27: “Classical” CCM buildings to house “Classical” music .......................................................................... 81 Figure 28: Pediment ornament, Dieterle Vocal Arts Center ................................................................................. 82 Figure 29: Entrance ornament, Dieterle Vocal Arts Center .................................................................................. 82 Figure 30: Ornament, Memorial Hall ................................................................................................................... 82 Figure 31: Gargoyle, Memorial Hall ...................................................................................................................... 82 Figure 32: Janus – old & young ............................................................................................................................. 84 Figure 33: Arch of Janus, Rome ............................................................................................................................ 84 Figure 34: Janus coin ............................................................................................................................................. 86 Figure 35: Janus, both bearded ............................................................................................................................. 86 Figure 36: Traditional conception of white antiquity against the reconstructed painted reality .......................... 87 Figure 37: Classical column and entablature as reconstructed in color ............................................................... 88 Figure 38: Sculpture with paint remnants intact .................................................................................................. 89


Figure 39: Boy’s face reconstructed in color ......................................................................................................... 89 Figure 40: Decorative tablet showing vase before and after color reconstruction ............................................... 89 Figure 41: Roman wall mosaic ............................................................................................................................... 92 Figure 42: Cincinnati Union Terminal mosaic detail ............................................................................................ 92 Figure 43: Roman floor mosaic ............................................................................................................................. 92 Figure 44: modern Rookwood tilework ................................................................................................................. 92 Figure 45: Charlie Harper’s Peck Federal Building animal mosaic in downtown Cincinnati ...............................93 Figure 46: Harper mosaic detail 1 ..........................................................................................................................93 Figure 47: Harper mosaic detail 2 ..........................................................................................................................93 Figure 48: Union Terminal brilliant polychrome interior with vast Art Deco glass mosaics ............................... 94 Figure 49: Janus arch, coins, bust, and graphic translation .................................................................................. 95 Figure 50: Janus icons, Janus phases - metaphorical ‘mythology’ ....................................................................... 96 Figure 51: Janus typography new / old constructions ........................................................................................... 97 Figure 52: IVC Mark – String instrument F-holes ................................................................................................ 99 Figure 53: IVC mark construction ........................................................................................................................ 101 Figure 54: IVC ‘secondary architecture’ assets and primary mark crop fragments ............................................. 102 Figure 55: IVC primary mark with polychrome treatment .................................................................................. 103 Figure 56: UC website showing red/black and “swoop” theme ........................................................................... 105 Figure 57: The UC Branding Standards manual .................................................................................................. 106 Figure 58: IVC stationery as reinterpreted UC brand identity without direct reference ..................................... 107 Figure 59: IVC color palette .................................................................................................................................. 109 Figure 60: View of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district looking toward UC’s campus atop Clifton hill ............ 110 Figure 61: Findlay Market’s polychrome palette ................................................................................................... 111 Figure 62: Victorian townhouses in Over-the-Rhine ........................................................................................... 112 Figure 63: Union Terminal lobby showing polychrome “sun” ............................................................................. 112 Figure 64: IVC website Artists duotone mosaic ................................................................................................... 113 Figure 65: IVC poster typographic color .............................................................................................................. 113 Figure 66: IVC poster polychrome type ................................................................................................................ 114 Figure 67: IVC poster polychrome mark with UC logo ........................................................................................ 114 Figure 68: IVC program book polychrome mark ................................................................................................. 114 Figure 69: Didot specimen, H&FJ – New York .................................................................................................... 116 Figure 70: Gotham specimen, H&FJ – New York ................................................................................................. 117 Figure 71: Alright Sans specimen, Okay Type ...................................................................................................... 118 Figure 72: Sentinel specimen, H&FJ – New York ................................................................................................ 119 Figure 73: Didot uses multiple optical sizes to keep hairlines thin at any point size .......................................... 121 Figure 74: Didot specimen setting IVC-specific text content ............................................................................... 122 Figure 75: Didot, developed by H&FJ for the redesign of Harper’s Bazaar ......................................................... 123 Figure 76: Didot on the covers of Bazaar & Vogue in Japan, UK, Spanish & Turkish versions .......................... 124 Figure 77: Didot in historic editions and modern musical scores ........................................................................ 125 Figure 78: 1811 example of Didot in use ............................................................................................................... 126


Figure 79: Didot in use in a 1902 edition ............................................................................................................. 127 Figure 80: Clarendon (slab serif like Sentinel) in use at Findlay Market ............................................................ 130 Figure 81: Fette Fraktur, a prototypical German “blackletter” ............................................................................ 132 Figure 82: IVC certificates using typographically generated ornamental borders .............................................. 134 Figure 83: IVC pattern 1 ....................................................................................................................................... 135 Figure 84: IVC pattern 2, enlarged ....................................................................................................................... 135 Figure 85: IVC pattern 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 136 Figure 86: IVC pattern 4 ....................................................................................................................................... 136 Figure 87: IVC pattern 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 136 Figure 88: IVC pattern 6 ....................................................................................................................................... 136 Figure 89: IVC postcards ...................................................................................................................................... 138 Figure 90: IVC poster, blue .................................................................................................................................. 140 Figure 91: IVC poster, red ..................................................................................................................................... 141 Figure 92: IVC poster, green ................................................................................................................................. 142 Figure 93: IVC poster color variations ................................................................................................................. 143 Figure 94: IVC program front cover ..................................................................................................................... 146 Figure 95: IVC program back cover ...................................................................................................................... 148 Figure 96: IVC program front and back covers, old and new .............................................................................. 149 Figure 97: IVC program welcome spread ............................................................................................................. 150 Figure 98: IVC program bilingual Latin-English with Janus phase masks ..........................................................151 Figure 99: IVC program acknowledgements spread ............................................................................................ 152 Figure 100: IVC program event map and schedule spread .................................................................................. 153 Figure 101: IVC program center tactile paper change – glossy white to matte buff ............................................ 154 Figure 102: IVC program events listing title frontispiece .................................................................................... 155 Figure 103: IVC program artist bios frontispiece ................................................................................................. 156 Figure 104: IVC program artist bios ..................................................................................................................... 157 Figure 105: IVC CCM wayfinding signage map 1 ................................................................................................. 158 Figure 106: IVC CCM wayfinding signage map 2 ................................................................................................. 159 Figure 107: CCM event venue map ....................................................................................................................... 160 Figure 108: UC campus map ................................................................................................................................ 161 Figure 109: Public transportation schedules and campus map icon legend ........................................................ 162 Figure 110: UC campus map featuring IVC venue with Janus face...................................................................... 163 Figure 111: CCM event venue map in program book ............................................................................................ 164 Figure 112: Event wayfinding easel signage placed in hallways ........................................................................... 165 Figure 113: Downtown Cincinnati hotels and dining options map ...................................................................... 166 Figure 114: Off-campus dining directory and map ............................................................................................... 167 Figure 115: Easel sign for special event sponsor recognition ............................................................................... 168 Figure 116: Display case series 1 – map and schedule .......................................................................................... 170 Figure 117: Display case series 2 – acknowledgements ........................................................................................ 170 Figure 118: Display case series 3 – main titling with Janus faces ......................................................................... 171


Figure 119; Display case series 1 installed ............................................................................................................. 171 Figure 120: Display case series 2 installed ........................................................................................................... 172 Figure 121: Display case series 3 installed, showing all three sets ....................................................................... 172 Figure 122: UC Event Services staff at IVC registration ....................................................................................... 174 Figure 123: IVC merchandise and nametags ........................................................................................................ 174 Figure 124: IVC event tickets and postcards ........................................................................................................ 175 Figure 125: IVC event tickets ................................................................................................................................ 176 Figure 126: IVC concert programs, tickets, and musician rosters ....................................................................... 177 Figure 127: IVC recording list, certificates, and table cards ................................................................................. 178 Figure 128: IVC website home page, full .............................................................................................................. 180 Figure 129: IVC website home page, enlarged ..................................................................................................... 181 Figure 130: IVC website home page feature article headers ................................................................................ 182 Figure 131: IVC website polychrome article header system ................................................................................. 183 Figure 132: IVC website banner ads for sponsors ................................................................................................ 184 Figure 133: IVC video page, full ............................................................................................................................ 185 Figure 134: IVC artist bios, full ............................................................................................................................. 185 Figure 135: Blogging team training ...................................................................................................................... 187 Figure 136: Blogging team up and running .......................................................................................................... 187 Figure 137: IVC mobile web poster ....................................................................................................................... 187 Figure 138: IVC native mobile web menu system ................................................................................................ 187 Figure 139: IVC website blog articles ................................................................................................................... 189 Figure 140: Masao Kawasaki and Catharine Carroll open the IVC 2010 ............................................................. 191 Figure 141: Dieterle Vocal Arts Center is transformed into exhibition hall ......................................................... 191 Figure 142: The crowd begins to fill the auditorium for a gala recital ................................................................. 191 Figure 143: Roberto Diaz plays demo excerpts on many viola maker’s instruments for an audience ................ 192 Figure 144: Luthiers’ wares on display ................................................................................................................. 192 Figure 145: Discussing proper posture ................................................................................................................. 192 Figure 146: Onlookers watch a master class......................................................................................................... 193 Figure 147: Student workshop on bowing technique ........................................................................................... 193 Figure 148: A lecture / workshop session gets participants involved .................................................................. 194 Figure 149: A roundtable discussion session ....................................................................................................... 194 Figure 150: An accompanied master class ........................................................................................................... 195 Figure 151: The IVC gala banquet ......................................................................................................................... 195 Figure 152: World-class performers filled the IVC roster .................................................................................... 195 Figure 153: Tadanori Yokoo - Japan ..................................................................................................................... 196 Figure 154: Itu Chaudhuri - India ......................................................................................................................... 199 Figure 155: Saki Mafundikwa - Zimbabwe ........................................................................................................... 201 Figure 156: Majid Abbasi - Iran ........................................................................................................................... 202 Figure 157: Memed Erdener - Turkey .................................................................................................................. 204 Figure 158: Segun Olude - Nigeria....................................................................................................................... 206


Figure 159: U.G. Sato - Japan .............................................................................................................................. 206 Figure 160: Frank Lloyd Wright – Falling Water ................................................................................................ 207 Figure 161: LeCorbusier - Villa Savoye ................................................................................................................ 207 Figure 162:Paula Scher - Bring In ‘Da Noise ....................................................................................................... 208 Figure 163: Josef Müller-Brockmann – Beethoven poster ................................................................................. 208 Figure 164: Colorist, cover .................................................................................................................................... 211 Figure 165: Colorist, color matrix ......................................................................................................................... 212 Figure 166: Colorist, color preference types ......................................................................................................... 213 Figure 167: Colorist, checklist of color skills ........................................................................................................ 214 Figure 168: Colorist, regional colors, deep ........................................................................................................... 215 Figure 169: Colorist, building materials ............................................................................................................... 216 Figure 170: Colorist, naturals ............................................................................................................................... 217 Figure 171: Colorist, greens ................................................................................................................................... 218 Figure 172: Colorist, blues .................................................................................................................................... 219 Figure 173: Colorist, white ................................................................................................................................... 220 Figure 174: Colorist, Black .................................................................................................................................... 221 Figure 175: Colorist, methodology for researching and recording local color .................................................... 222 Figure 176: Colorist, city color surveys 1 ............................................................................................................. 223 Figure 177: Colorist, city color surveys 2 ............................................................................................................. 224 Figure 178: Colorist, city identity in color ............................................................................................................ 225 Figure 179: National type quiz: guess the country of origin for these 2012 fonts ................................................ 231 Figure 180: Answers to national type quiz .......................................................................................................... 232 Figure 181: Spatial Sync Chart, overall view ......................................................................................................... 237 Figure 182: Spatial sync graph view .................................................................................................................... 238 Figure 183: Spatial sync sparklines ..................................................................................................................... 239 Figure 184: The shifting priorities of regionalist versus modernist design ........................................................ 240


Chapter one: Introduction

Context and scope of the thesis

This thesis investigation arose from a design opportunity that came to me in late

2008 through a contact at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music

(CCM). I had previously designed a number of small graphic projects for CCM, and the

school was planning an international music conference for the summer of 2010, the

International Viola Congress (IVC). I was only told that they needed a graphic designer

to help with the promotions and event program book. Soon, I met with Catharine

Carroll, professor of viola, and her graduate assistant, Dominic DeStefano, who were

planning the event, and came to discover the true scale of the undertaking. It was going

to be a large international music conference with hundreds of attendees and nearly a

hundred world-famous guest artists from across the globe! I realized they would need a

lot more than a poster and program to pull it off, and I probably should have started

rallying design support from trepidation at that point.

But, as the discussions progressed, it became clear that their budget would not

allow for the kind of design team effort such an event would require if produced outside

of an academic environment. And, the challenge turned out to be uniquely suited to my

background. I was originally trained as an architect at the University of Cincinnati’s

College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), and I had recently

completed nearly all of the coursework for the Master of Design program (focusing on

environmental graphics) in the same college ten years after graduating architecture

school. Before architecture school, I had studied piano at the University of Akron

following a musical training throughout my childhood in piano and French Horn.

Having this understanding of music, training in graphic design, and a sensitivity to the


architectural site of the upcoming conference all felt like signs that I should get involved.

I saw clearly that the power of design could help to organize and transform the event,

and it seemed a shame to let typical event planning, budget, and resource issues prevent

CCM from realizing the potential of such a great roster of visiting scholars and

musicians. Besides, Catharine was also kind (or naïve) enough to put her trust in me to

help them single-handedly. So, I decided to offer my help in full and throw caution to

the wind, regardless of the work involved.

Throughout our graduate school seminar program, J Chewning (my thesis

committee chair) focused our readings and discussions less on aesthetic concerns

usually emphasized in undergraduate design training and more on design’s role in the

emerging digitally connected and globalized culture. We wrote peer-reviewed essays and

enjoyed long roundtable debates about provocative readings that outlined the

responsibilities and challenges designers now face in a globalized economy and

increasingly flattened social landscape. It was exactly what I needed after ten years of

fruitful but rather deadening corporate design work at a large architecture-engineering

firm to refill my tanks, broaden my perspective, and help me to develop a framework for

my own critical design practice.

It struck me immediately that the IVC 2010 event drew together many of these

design issues on a site perfectly suited as a backdrop to the theoretical debate about

globalism and modernity. Not only did the event focus on the viola—often neglected as a

second sister to the more glamorous violin—and the current state of classical music, but

the architecture of the CCM village campus had recently been overhauled by the major

international architectural design firm of Pei, Cobb, Freed. Their design faced the

conundrum of blending traditional with modern building head-on by renovating two


existing neo-classical and neo-gothic structures, constructing a new modern main hall,

and stitching them all together with a unified substructure parking deck that created a

common outdoor circular plaza on top. Add to this stage a mixture of regional and

national music students (mostly from the Midwest) and a group of musical stars of

international repute traveling from four continents to discuss the current state of the

centuries-old Western musical tradition, and the content and themes of the conference

practically started to design themselves!

It was only long after the conference had completed that I realized it would make

a strong case study to revisit critically for insights into the position of “regionalism” and

“sited” visual communications within graphic design practice. The concept has barely

made a dent in the profession as a whole, and almost nothing has been written about it

in a sustained or cohesive way beyond occasional references to regional work in design

periodicals (case in point: the Regional Design Annual issue of PRINT magazine). Given

my background, I once again felt that I could make a contribution by simply attempting

to port over to graphic design even a small amount of the theoretical groundwork

already laid down by many writers and designers in urban planning and architecture

over the last fifty years. It is surprising to me that there has been to date so little

crossover of these ideas into other design disciplines, given the enormous mass of

debate and writing in the environmental design disciplines.

If this investigation only begins to illuminate how graphic designers might

incorporate regional sensitivities into their work in a contemporary and considered

way, I would call it a success. The full scope of such “translational” research (a term

used more precisely by the hard sciences, particularly medicine, in bringing “basic”

research to market in usable products or processes) is far beyond what I could hope to


accomplish with one thesis, in fact, far beyond what one person could do with an entire

career. It would take a full-fledged movement to germinate regional ideas within graphic

design. But I believe the broader framework of ideas that regionalism offers could prove

immensely useful in guiding the profession through the emerging maze of globalized

economic and social forces to which it has become an alternating dependent, lover,

captive, promoter, observer, reveler, enabler, and critic.

Finally, in part, this is a personal exploration for me (I know—a cliché among

thesis documents) into why I’ve stayed where I am for so long. I remember my senior

year of architecture school when thoughts were turning to life after graduation, and

professors were imparting last thoughts and advice before christening us into

professional practice. After hearing that I had accepted a job offer from a large

architecture/engineering firm here in Cincinnati, two of them came to me separately

and said outright that they thought it was a mistake. They felt I needed to go to a big-

name design firm in a style center like New York with a ‘signature’ design lead partner

where “good” design was being done in order to further my career. I took it for the

compliment it was at the time, the assumed implication being that they thought I had

enough potential as a designer that it would be wasted on such a provincial job and city

as the one I accepted in Cincinnati.

I continued in that job for a decade, admittedly about five years longer than I

probably should have for various reasons in hindsight, and then returned to graduate

school at the same college of UC-DAAP, albeit in another school within the college

(which might as well have been another planet with entirely different faculty voices and

positions about design.) And then I taught at the same school for five years in various

capacities, still living in the very same apartment downtown whose lease I took over


from my best friend in undergraduate school fifteen years earlier. As of this writing, I’m

still there, still in Cincinnati, still designing, still learning and discovering areas I want

to explore, but never once finding enough temptation to pack up and leave town like I

did so many times as an itinerant architectural co-op student (Boston, Nashville,

Atlanta, Cincinnati…all within the six-year program).

I’ve tried to think about why this is: perhaps I am just a homebody and content

with life wherever it finds me, or just too humble and lazy to change. Indeed, I’ve never

felt compelled to uproot for a bigger city in order to work. I’ve always felt I could do

good design work from wherever I please, that it’s not the place that makes the design,

but the designer. Upon further reflection, I think that’s wrong, in part. Place does

matter, but not for the reasons those two professors seemed to believe. I think their

comments were very in line with standard views about living away from the major

cultural centers that seem to shine outward from themselves some sort of inferiority

complex laser beam that strikes outliers and paradoxically gets stronger with distance

until overwhelmed by the influence of the same laser beams radiating from the next

cultural center. It’s an entirely imaginary net of feeling bad about ourselves for not being

ambitious enough to flock somewhere like the Big Apple since “we can make it

anywhere” later, if we survive.

Instead, I’m beginning to awaken to the possibility that I’m simply a designer

who sees value in remaining grounded in a specific environment and finding a source of

not only comfort, but also power in gaining detailed knowledge of life in the place where

I am. The rootlessness that comes from the remarkable mobility of which Americans are

capable is something I’ve assiduously avoided, and I’m starting to think it’s something of

a kryptonite against good design. I have long held a joke about my love-hate (and


sometimes hate-hate) relationship with Cincinnati that says it is the city where

“ambition comes to die, but turns into comfort.” On first glance, that seems harsh, but at

least there’s comfort involved! I still believe the statement holds true, but I don’t

necessarily think it’s merely a backhanded compliment anymore.

I think in most cases, ambition should die. Frankly, I have always held an active

disdain for those who willingly display their ambition since it’s been my experience that

they are usually prideful and vainglorious people who are oblivious to the consequences

for others of being so driven. Ambition is one of those words, like “pride,” whose once

negative meaning has become positive through connotation (don’t we tell all kids in

school they should be “proud” of themselves, if only to inure them to the dreadful global

competition they face?) We need to take that language back and restore some humanist

values in order to face cultural challenges like our current fetish-obsession with personal

gadget technology and maintain some balance between what is real and what will always

remain simulated. And I think regionalism just might help.

Goals and Outcomes

I undertake this writing in the hopes that I’m right about my hunch that

regionalism holds promise for graphic design practice (and life in general in post-

Facebook America). A major goal is simply to draw from sources outside of visual

communications (architecture, planning, art criticism, and philosophy) and provide

some theoretical groundwork for a regionalist mode of practice in graphic design. For

that to occur, there need to be new connections and vocabulary between visual and

environmental design disciplines to better foster collaborative work with common

cultural goals. If nothing else, I hope I can provoke discussion among designers about


“sited” design and ultimately give them tools which promote sensitivity to place and

regional values and which help them to project an authentic voice.


Chapter two: Modernism and regionalism in graphic design

Groundwork: From the “modern” forward

Regardless of discipline, every graduate of an American or European design

school must at some level come to terms with their cultural inheritance from the

modern movement. It simply can’t be ignored, if only because it has been the dominant

theoretical framework around which design education and critique have been conducted

for nearly a century. In a revealing and pertinent interview granted to the Creators

Project by contemporary graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, he describes his (at least

partial) disenchantment with the essentially modernist training he received in art

school:

The Creators Project (CP): Your work is very different from the rest of the graphic

design landscape. It’s more organic and more controversial in a lot of ways.

Stefan Sagmeister (SS): For a long time we’ve tried to make design that’s

somehow more personal, possibly more human-centered, more organic, more

handmade, less objective, and more subjective. At the advent of modernism in the

1920s, the human being was designed out of design—not just in graphics, but also in

architecture and product design. The new machine age was so exciting to designers

and architects that they wanted to get rid of everything organic, down to the very

essentials. A fellow Austrian even wrote a book called Ornament and Crime [Adolf

Loos], arguing that people like sailors who adorn themselves with tattoos are

criminal to begin with, and that the pure soul of course goes for something that’s

much more distilled. Now, of course we’ve had almost 100 years of modernism, and

like any historic state, it’s become stale and boring. There are plenty of possibilities

and areas where modernist thinking makes a whole lot of sense, including stuff

we’ve done in the studio here that works quite well. I just think as a overall all-

encompassing movement modernism does not have all the answers in 2010…

CP: What are some of the differences between the way you run things and a

traditional design firm?


SS: One of the differences is that we don’t, or have not in the past, shied away from

the personal. So many designers when they come out of school have this feeling

that, you know, form follows function. It always has to come exactly out of the

functionality of the thing. Often, taking a complete reverse approach is very

advantageous. I think beauty is not just in function. There is beauty in non-

functionality.

Since the modern experiment extended its tentacles into so many cultural areas

of production, coming to terms with it in contemporary practice often entails tracing

one or more of its tangled arms back in order to strike at its core with a current

perspective. Every trained designer has, consciously or not, felt this angst and struggle

in adapting what we know are rules about good design (inherited from education) with

what we believe, feel, and currently experience, almost a century after the modern rift

opened. And on a broader cultural scale, it appears that we may be at several

simultaneous tipping points toward regionalist resurging against corporate modernism,

namely the “local food” movement, the emergence of DIY design against impersonal

mass-production processes, and the explosion of sustainability as more than just an

abstract idea but a holistic outlook and tenable way of life.

But to begin moving forward from modernism and forming a theory of

regionalism that can apply to graphic design, we must first begin charting possible

definitions of what “regions” even are. Canizaro offers the following epigrams as

opening shots across the bow:

Regionalism is not a fixed concept. No region, whether natural or cultural, is stable.

—Felix Frankfurter

as quoted in Merrill Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America (Madison: Univ. of

Wisconsin Press, 1965), xvi.


In other words, the nature of a “region” varies with the needs, purposes, and

standards of those using the concept.

—Merrill Johnson (ibid)

Regionalism suggests a cure for many current ills. Focused in the region, sharpened

for the more definite enhancement of life, every activity, cultural or practical, menial

or liberal, becomes necessary and significant; divorced from this context, and

dedicated to archaic or abstract schemes of salvation and happiness, even the finest

activities seem futile and meaningless; they are lost and swallowed in a vast

indefiniteness.

—Lewis Mumford

(“The Theory and Practice of Regionalism,” Sociological Review 20 (April

1928): 140.

To expand possible ideas of “region” along a spectrum, Canizaro writes:

A region is, first, a large area with boundaries determined by a range of cultural and

natural criteria. At the extreme cultural end, visible in the etymology of the term,

political control or the establishment of jurisdictions is the criterion. At the opposite

end, region is determined by naturally occurring physical features. (Canizaro, 2007,

p. 18)

Barbara Allen focuses instead on the purely social aspect of “region”:

A region is a socially constructed concept. I define a region as a collection of shared

geographically located identities. It is a locale in which people share an identity, or at

least participate in compatible social practices. (Allen, 2007, p. 422)

Whatever definitions of “region” with which one chooses to align, it must serve to

orient one to a specific place, and this is often at odds with the cultural inheritance we

received from the modern movement’s ideals and with the unchecked expansion of

unrooted, supranational corporate ‘brand’ spaces.


Corporate rootlessness and Ralph Nader

Stuck in the middle of modernism and its attendant ‘international style’ and the

idea of regionalism is the intermediate nationalism (sometimes mistaken for

patriotism.) People in the past were far more allegiant to the concept of the nation-state

than today, and probably so since the idea has always been filled with discomfort and

outright hostility. “A Nation,” so goes a rueful European saying, “is a group of persons

united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their

neighbors.” (Deutsch, 1969, p. 3)

The “International Style” was created at a time when being “international”

required an entirely different set of cultural and technological criteria. Many of today’s

kids are interacting on an international stage several times before breakfast each day on

Twitter. People’s allegiances today tend toward the cosmopolitan cities they inhabit or

love most to visit, and their alignment with global brand “tribes” (a rather gross

characterization of consumers by corporate brand designers—akin to the ‘noble savages’

of 19th century imperialist Europeans.)

To further this, it is corporate America that has steadfastly dismantled a sense of

national allegiances in order to compete in global markets and transcend nationalist

political limitations by becoming “citizens of the world.” And graphic design cannot but

follow closely behind the feeding trough. It is only natural for graphic designers to shed

their local and regional roots when serving multinational corporations in their quest to

expand geographic reach beyond national borders. Frampton offers:

Among the disturbing structural changes taking place is the ever-expanding power of

the multinational corporations; we should not deceive ourselves for a moment as to

the relative indifference of these conglomerates to the welfare of the society in which

they happen to be based. Under their hegemony, patriotism is transformed into an


absurdity and regional differentiation is a factor to be eliminated. What they value

most is a universal, undifferentiated abacus upon which the ebb and flow of value-

free exchange and profit can be facilitated and maintained. (Frampton, 2007, p 376)

In a rather blunt media stunt carried out directly to this point, Ralph Nader sent

a letter to the top 100 American companies’ CEOs in 1998 that asked them if they would

consider reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States flag in the name of their

companies to start their respective stockholder meetings. He told them that he would

await their responses and that they would be published on his website on July 4th of that

year. Most companies completely ignored it, and a few sent terse or even hostile replies.

It is interesting that only a Cincinnati company, Federated Department Stores,

responded that they would indeed consider it and thought it would be a good idea.

Nader repeated the same letter writing campaign in June of 2012, much to the

same effect, only more silence in return. Here is the complete 2012 letter along with a

response to the original 1998 letter by the conservative Alan Keyes, a former Reagan-era

diplomat.

Ralph Nader, Corporate Pledge of Allegiance Letter, 2012 June 22

Letter sent to:

1. ExxonMobil

2. Wal-Mart Stores

3. Chevron

4. Conoco Phillips

5. General Motors

6. General Electric

7. Cardinal Health

8. Fannie Mae

9. Ford Motor

10. Hewlett-Packard


11. AT&T

12. Valero Energy

13. Bank of America Corp.

14. McKesson

15. Verizon Communications

16. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

17. Apple

18. CVS Caremark

19. International Business Machines

20. Citigroup

June 20, 2012

“…with liberty and justice for all.”

Dear CEO,

Corporations and their attorneys like to be judged as “persons” under our

constitutions and laws. So it is entirely appropriate to judge the character of a U.S.

chartered corporation by the measure of corporate patriotism – especially if it is

operating worldwide. Here is a start.

Do you think it desirable to have you and your president at your annual shareholders

meetings stand up on the stage and, in the name of your company (not your diverse

board of directors), pledge allegiance to our flag* that is completed by the ringing

phrase “with liberty and justice for all?”

About 15 years ago I wrote to the CEOs of the top 100 U.S. corporations urging

them to take the occasion of the annual shareholders meeting to pledge, in the name

of their U.S. chartered corporate entity, allegiance to the flag. The responses were

instructive. Many said they would review the request, some turned it down, while

others were ambiguous, misconstruing the request as requesting the Board of

Directors instead of the U.S. chartered corporate entity. Federated Department

Stores expressly thought it was a good suggestion. Wal-Mart replied that they would

“give it every consideration.” Citicorp (now Citigroup) wrote that it is “not our

practice to respond.”

In the years since, Americans have wondered about where U.S. companies, who

grew to success with American workers and were given bailouts and subsidies from


American taxpayers, stood on this cardinal issue of corporate patriotism. Too many

American jobs and industries have been sent abroad to dictatorial regimes and

oligarchic societies to dispel the impression of abandoning America for greater profits

and greater license in these “serf-labor,” anti-independent trade union, nations.

Having due regard to millions of loyal, hard-working American workers, who have

lost a great deal, if not everything, in this global economy is long overdue. Their

sense of betrayal is palpable. It would be an expression of respect to assert an

allegiance to the country of your company’s birth and the laborers who made your

company into an economic power.

Please respond to the bracketed question above, as soon as possible, at any of the

contact points below. We are going to release all of the responses and non-responses

on the Fourth of July.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

* The phrasing is obvious: “The General Motors (or Exxon or Citigroup or DuPont

etc.) corporation pledges allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and

the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and

justice for all.” (Nader, 2013)

Alan Keyes’ response to Nader’s original letter in 1998:

“What ever happened to national allegiance?”

We would be unwise to overlook the serious implications of this dissolution of

national allegiance, so deftly revealed by Nader’s letter to the corporations…Part of

the answer is clear. The sectors of the corporate world that are openly without

national allegiance of any kind participate in our national political process without

identifying with the Republic or its people. And the money deployed by such

corporations in pursuit of their international economic benefit can quite effectively

entangle politicians in precisely this culture of independence from any national

allegiance.


This danger is one of the reasons that the best thing we could do to clean up

campaigns and campaign finance would be to make sure that nobody who doesn’t

have a ballot vote has a dollar vote. We should exclude all corporations, unions, and

other organizations from making financial contributions in the political sector. Only

individuals who are allowed to vote should be allowed to contribute. This would at

least begin to alleviate the detrimental influence of that part of the corporate sector

which no longer feels that it is part of America. (Keyes, 2013)

(Keep in mind that this is a staunch high-ranking Reagan administration

diplomat criticizing Republicans for enabling the whole-hearted corporate sector

embrace of globalism at the expense of national identity!)

Authenticity and simulation

If a priority for real experiences to connect people to regional sensibilities is to be

established, a sense of authenticity needs to be cultivated in the places we value and the

life—and life-informed work—that is inseparable from them. Canizaro has this to say:

I contend that authenticity is a quality of engagement between people and things or

people and places. It is not a property inherent to things or places but a measure of

our connection to them. Architectural theorist Kim Dovey suggests that the authentic

object or environment must be “of undisputed origin,” its form should be connected

to its process of creation; it must be genuine, things are what they appear to be or

what one expects them to be; and it must be reliable, it should continue to function

over time. [“The Quest for Authenticity and the Replication of Environmental

Meaning,” in David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, eds., Dwelling, Place &

Environment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 3-49.] Satisfaction of

these three conditions results in what Dovey refers to as “experiential depth,” which

is connectedness without deception—when one’s knowledge of a thing or place is

backed up by its reality. (Canizaro, 2007, p. 26-27)

Michael Benedikt’s moving and passionate case for turning away from the

abstractions of the modern movement and toward what he calls “direct aesthetic

experiences of the real” are at once poetic and profound:


There are valued times in almost everyone’s existence when the world is perceived

afresh: perhaps after a rain as the sun glistens on the streets and windows catch a

departing cloud, or, alone, when one sees again the roundness of an apple. At these

times our perceptions are not at all sentimental. They are, rather, matter of fact,

neutral and undesiring—yet suffused with an unreasoned joy at the simple

correspondence of appearance and reality, at the evident rightness of things as they

are. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 2)

Such experiences, such privileged moments, can be profoundly moving; and

precisely from such moments, I believe, we build our best and necessary sense of an

independent yet meaningful reality. I should like to call them direct aesthetic

experiences of the real and to suggest the following: in our media-saturated times it

falls to architecture to have the direct aesthetic experience of the real at the center

of its concerns. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 3)

We seem to fear that unless we keep talking and calling upon the world to talk, we

will be overcome by the dread muteness of objects and by the heedlessness of

nature, that we might awaken to our “true” condition as “strangers in a strange

land.”…we need not fear. On to any moment of perception—instantly, inevitably and

without bidding—the perspective of an entire cultural and biological heritage is

brought to bear. Our uprightness is in every tree, rocks divide themselves into the

throwable and the not, the future is always ahead.

Even, or especially, when the world is seen most sensitively, vividly and

dispassionately, our humanness is already soaked into it. Just as whipping around to

see your back in a mirror is futile, so no objective—that is, non-human—viewpoint,

no matter how brief, can be taken with respect to reality. You cannot catch the world

unaware and naked of meaning. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 10)

Philosopher Paul Ricouer lays much of the blame for a lack of authenticity in

contemporary culture at the feet of consumerism:

We have the feeling that this single world civilization at the same time exerts a sort

of attrition or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have

made the great civilizations of the past…Everywhere throughout the world, one finds

the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum

atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc. It seems as if

mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en


masse at a subcultural level…It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the

shock of modem civilization. There is the paradox: how to become modem and to

return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in

universal civilization.

The assessment according to French theorist Jean Baudrillard is more grim and

more damning to graphic design since advertising is still its primary occupation:

Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression

into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are

absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and

instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common

denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all

possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated,

instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possibility of

metamorphosis, has power over all the others…Thus the form of advertising has

imposed itself and developed at the expense of all the other languages as an

increasingly neutral, equivalent rhetoric, without affects, as an “asyntactic

nebula”…which envelopes us from every side. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 87-88)

Kenneth Frampton, probably the primary figure associated with regionalism in

architecture due to his early development of the idea of “critical regionalism,” also

focuses much of the blame for a loss of reality on our media-saturated culture:

In general, we have begun to lose our capacity for distinguishing between

information and experience, not only in architecture, but in everything else as well.

Reality and irreality are deliberately confused and fused together. We oscillate

between the soap opera and world destruction. We are switched, whether we like it

or not, between the blandishments of the commercial and the irreality of terrorism…

I dwell on the media because of the extent to which we are conditioned by them,

consciously or otherwise, so much so that we often read buildings as picturesque

images of structures, rather than opening ourselves to a direct experience of their

corporeal form. (Frampton, 2007, p. 381)


After the rush to globalize, expand networks, open markets, tear down barriers,

and gain interconnected digital access to more information about our accumulated lives

than has ever existed before in history, we have perhaps flown too far past the coop to

stay grounded. It seems that we are simultaneously now in a phase of readjustment in

the same corporate realm that slashed and burned this new cultural landscape. The

pendulum may well be swinging back toward a realization that newly accessible local

markets across the globe are thornier to conquer than expected with data and market

expansion alone. This is making designers with intensive regional knowledge valuable

and leaving it to the profession to search for more ways toward understanding the

influence of place in design practice.

Genius loci: History + memory + space = place

Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of

Architecture has been required reading in architecture schools across the nation since

its publication in 1980. By extending the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Norberg-

Schulz creates a phenomenological foothold for restoring our sense of reality to the

direct experience of place:

Man dwells when he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an

environment, or, in short, when he experiences the environment as meaningful.

Dwelling therefore implies something more than “shelter.” It implies that the spaces

where life occurs are places, in the true sense of the word. A place is a space which

has a distinct character. Since ancient times the genius loci, or “spirit of place,” has

been recognized as the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in

his daily life. Architecture means to visualize the genius loci, and the task of the

architect is to create meaningful places, whereby he helps man to dwell. (Norberg-

Shulz, 1980, p. 5)


A fundamental poverty of much graphic design today is that designers tend to

think of their works as “self-siting” or wholly self-contained and portable within a

universal space (the page, the screen), equally taken in Paris as in Lima, and especially

so in the digital realm where the only prerequisite is an internet connection and

browsing device. The assumption is that their limit of responsibility is the format’s edge,

and then the world drops off into a nothingness beyond their influence. Relationships

between color, form, content development and to space beyond the format, if they are

created consciously at all, are contrived in relation to placeless corporate brand spaces.

My guess is that many graphic designers fully expect that their audience is so engrossed

in the reading or viewing experience so carefully crafted for them, that they become

immersed in the self-referencing world the designer has established and the world

around fades away.

I get the distinct impression that most designers’ greatest wish is to share this

fantasy world they’ve invested such time and thought in making with a reader who

equally values the portal directly into the content-land that’s been provided. It’s not

necessarily a selfish wish; in fact, I think it’s usually quite well-meaning and generous at

heart. Designers on the whole want to do good things, but their frame of reference for

how their work is fully received in a sited place by their human audience is usually

painfully narrow. The highest praise any book designer of a strictly modernist art

monograph (think Phaidon) can achieve is the exalted solo placement at a 30 degree

angle, precisely adjusted to look as if haphazard, on a concrete and glass coffee table in

the architectural photo of a Boho-chic Manhattan loft (and who really cares what’s

inside those books?...it’s the promise of them that matters.)


The reality is that when I pick up a junk mail brochure from my mailbox and see

its message for the few seconds before I throw it away, a whole host of real, sited events

took place and intervened in the transaction: a car horn distracted me while I read the

title, I looked down to find the first step up my stairs and then forgot my phone’s ringer

wasn’t on before I caught a glimpse of the photo placed in the corner…In short, the

process made me take myself out of the place where I am and live and into the self-

referencing world of the communication piece and evaluate whether it’s a place wherein

I want to spend any more time than I already have, or if it feels at all relevant to my life.

Depending on the design, that can be a long journey. My point is that a modernist or

universal design does very little to meet me halfway in this transaction because it’s

equally well-tuned to be received by anyone else. It’s my choice and then responsibility

to join it out in the neutral ether of its own invention. Meanwhile, a regionalist design

coming from a practitioner who has intimate knowledge of the language I tend hear on

the street, the colors in my part of the world, the thoughts and values our region instills

through its permanent and rooted institutions, and who may likely be employing these

things on behalf of an entity which is itself invested in the health and life of the area, has

already come a long way to meet me. I no longer need a matted border of clean white

negative space around its edges to block out the peripheral world so I can concentrate

and enter its place undistracted. It has come toward my world already a native speaker

of a dialect I recognize, and I can lose its trompe l'oeil edges against any glimpse of my

neighborhood wherein I first encounter it.

Brand spaces versus real places

Many theorists would argue that the word “site” can be used equally when

discussing regional physical space as when discussing virtual web space, pointing to the


online virtual community of Second Life and the like. And indeed, brand spaces may

have the ability to be “mapped” using abstracted data sets like brand confidence ratings,

qualitative focus group surveys that identify brand value across multiple axes, and

consumer data that shows overlap in target demographic market segments.

In trying to discuss brands with students at DAAP over the years, I have adopted

a definition of the word “brand” as “mental real estate,” not only because it is succinct

and provocative, but because its metaphor is that of land use, farcically connecting it to

regionalism through planning, even though the stuff of brands themselves is entirely

immaterial. The corporate office campus of Google or any given Apple Store is merely

“brand-ed” space, not the brand space in which each company’s main value lies.

Brand spaces do not possess contiguity, persistence, or experiential

completeness.

They can be measured against each other with metrics, and one might be able to

visualize their cartography as zones on a graph while a given brand takes over another’s

market territory over time, much like the pieces on a Risk gameboard. But, these

visualizations are always mere abstractions. A brand must always be rendered visual to

be seen, and that’s exactly what commercial graphic design does: it gives tangible,

corporeal substance to the immaterial brand values floating through our collective

neurons. Brands are essentially discrete virtual realms that compete for mindspace

within each consumer on an individual basis. Every member of a “brand tribe” has a

different mental map of that space, and the residue of its character is as quicksilver as a

Twitter flock. Physical land, on the other hand, is a devastating repository of both our

collective memory and the marks we leave upon the land through its use, preservation,


exploitation, and destruction. Physical places are persistent records of their own

thingness and our being inside them.

Yet to many young people today, there is a blurring of difference, legitimacy, and

emotional investment between real and virtual spaces which imperils their sensitivity to

grounded and sited experiences. When trying to coax apart the tangled perceptions I

have of real and virtual spaces in our culture, I am reminded of these heavy, grounding

words in Rilke’s first Duino Elegy (1923), which seem as remarkably prescient when

taken in the context of Facebook today as when taken in the context of meditation on

love and loss nearly a century ago:

…the knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in / our interpreted

world. Perhaps there remains for us / some tree on a hillside, which every day we

can take / into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street / and the loyalty of

a habit so much at ease / when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

(Rilke & Mitchell, 1982, p. 151)

And later in his second Elegy:

…For it seems that everything / hides us. Look: trees do exist; the houses / that we

live in still stand. We alone / fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind. / And all

things conspire to keep silent about us, half / out of shame perhaps, half as

unutterable hope. (Rilke, p. 159)

Our cultural drift away from what is real has not, however, gone unchallenged in

the public sphere. The tagline of Adbusters magazine—“Journal of the Mental

Environment”—reveals their primary tactic in thwarting the marketing ploys of the

world’s major brands with spoof advertisements that employ the same tools of

persuasion. Called “culture jamming,” the subversive acts incited by the editorial staff

among their readership to expose corporate pretense about the legitimacy of brand

space amount to a rare and persistent cultural critique on the affects of abstracted


modern globalism in our mundane, sited lives. Love its message or hate it, one must

acknowledge that Adbusters doggedly illustrates our ultimate inheritance from the

modernist experiment—a flat, digital, and social media-driven diaspora from which our

young will find themselves challenged to reassemble sensitivity to the nuances of

personal, local, and regional experience. It is precisely these mercurial layers of

individual and collective meaning embedded, however imperceptibly to us, in our

memories and in our daily life that can become such a potent source of self identity and

content for regionalist designers.

Elements of regional graphic design

Nationalist identity in letterforms. Design students today tend to study the

classic, “workhorse” typefaces as though they are canon handed down from their

forebears without regard to the sited identities of the letterforms. Typefaces of the past

have often been connected to national identities of the type designers who created them.

But, this is not necessarily to say that letterforms themselves can be culturally unique or

specific to nation-states. The explosion of digital font technologies have created a

complete cultural mélange in typography, more than any other area of graphic design

practice. The technology directly enables this since fonts are something you use

immediately and very tangibly through desktop publishing platforms. Formal styles of

graphic design involving idiosyncratic use of form, color, and message which emerge

through global publication channels require imitation to spread, and that takes time—it

is several layers of cognitive work and processing removed from the original.

Without doubt, letterforms in the past were far more intimately tied to regional

place than today. They spread throughout Europe rather slowly due to the difficulty in

traveling and transporting large cases of lead type from country to country. Most


printers and type foundries up to the industrial era were reticent to create extra sets of

their metal faces to sell, out of the sheer labor involved and also out of preserving their

proprietary type styles. A few of the strongest national identity associations with fonts

still with us due to a long tradition of use are: Helvetica–Switzerland, Baskerville–

England, Didot & Garamond–France, Futura–Germany, and Blackletter–Germany.

For a detailed and interesting history of the connections between type and

national identities, see Modern Typography (Kinross, 1992), Blackletter: Type and

National History (Bain, Shaw, & Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art,

1998), and Mexican Blackletter (Paoli, 2007).

Regional form & ornament. We tend to have an intuitive understanding of

what our places in the world look and feel like, and sometimes due to overfamiliarity, a

blindness, too. A part of regional identity is certainly the character of its forms in

landscape and architecture. But what precisely are these characteristics and can they be

measured?


Figure 1: Aerial view of Paris

In a fascinating 2012 project submitted and presented to the Association for

Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive

Techniques (SIGGRAPH), five computer scientists created an image-matching software

program that would catalog, compare, and isolate unique urban architectural elements

from major urban centers by scouring hundreds of thousands of images embedded in

the databases of Google Street View (Doersch, Singh, Gupta, Sivic, & Efros, 2012).


Figure 2: Similar balcony railings geo-located throughout Paris

They determined that for building elements to be useful in characterizing a

region, they had to display two qualities: they needed to be both highly “frequent” and

highly “discriminative”, meaning the element in comparison (say, a certain type of

window moulding) needed to appear a number of times within a certain distance of each

other, and they needed to appear in only those areas and not in other cities being

compared. Perhaps using methods like this in the future, researchers will be able to put

real numbers and analytical metrics on what designers have intuitively felt and

transmitted to each other through the generations by example and experience.


Figure 3: Similar balcony across cities eliminates it as a distinctly ‘regional’ detail

Not only is this an exciting prospect for regionalist researchers of the built

environment, but of all design fields, because the storehouse of imagery contained in the

landscape and built places of a region are the primary repository of human form-making

with which an authentic and distinct regional vocabulary of forms that translate across

disciplinary boundaries can be generated.

Design training and discipline

The design world seems to turns away from the local and toward the universally

marketable at nearly every opportunity. It religiously worships the star system of its own

making, which promotes the ego-driven personalities of ‘signature’ designers as

transcendent of place, cultural boundary, or even disciplinary boundary. And the

educational system has done little to dissuade star-struck students from aspiring toward

promoting themselves as more than the sum of their training and experience, but rather

as complete lifestyle brands. The star system purports that once a designer has made a


splash large enough in, say, graphic design, it follows that he or she is perfectly entitled

to design teapots for Target, a fashion line for QVC, cocktails for Absolut, or host a

design reality show to spawn their own prodigies in front of an international audience,

and on, and on. Never mind that designers, artists, and craftspeople have spent lifetimes

dedicated to deep knowledge and expertise of any one of these given disciplines.

If design has fidgeted against modernism’s outward aesthetic agendas with

successive waves of stylistic reaction and counter-reaction, the core principles of

universal access to content that transcends human difference remains untouched as a

core principle which enables contemporary practice in a tightly networked global

market. In design’s voracious search for valuable content, it’s not about what can be

mined of reality in a search for meaning or empathic truths, but rather what can be

dredged in order to be pushed with least resistance. Successful designers have no

incentive to turn away from the core modernist programs which enable their status.

Auden said in the prologue to The Dyer’s Hand that “no poet or novelist [substitute

‘designer’ here] wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they

were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted”

(Auden, 1962, p. 14).

I can say that it is not a popular idea to college design students to tell them that

an ideal career would be spending thirty years making things that help people live better

lives but to do so enjoying almost complete anonymity in the process! Learning the

universal modernist language gives them access to jobs at big branding firms—skills and

a design vocabulary that are translatable, extensible, and commutable. They are not

encouraged to develop voices that draw heavily on their own experience and history and


sitedness, and would likely rebel if pushed to do so, citing irrelevance to their degree and

career goals.

The modernist agenda also plays directly into students’ academic rewards by

prioritizing clarity above emotive or personal content. Teachers love to teach

modernism because it’s just easier than picking through a student’s emotional and

historical baggage. Most design problems taught in schools emphasis rigorous logic and

methodology in order to ascertain the student’s ability to conceptualize clearly and then

execute a successful solution. If the pieces all wind up fitting in the box, the students are

usually patted on the head and left to their own devices to apply these skills to the

challenges of their careers employing whatever content they see fit. Addressing

individual identity—so necessary to a regionalist understanding of voice—is deemed as

being beyond the call of duty to design teachers. A teacher in my undergraduate

architectural education exclaimed one day in lecture, “Clarity is Intellectual Morality!” A

clearer warning bell for disallowing emotion in the creative work of students could

hardly be tolled by a professor, even if the point is well taken for someone still

developing their conceptual design skills.

Perhaps Charles Wright said it most eloquently in his introduction to the Best

American Poetry series, provocatively titled, “Improvisations on Profligacy and

Restraint,” when he wrote:

It’s difficult to be both clear and emotionally resonant. Perhaps that’s one of the

reasons the younger generations are anxious to excise emotion and its intensity out

of their poems [or designs, etc.] But cleverness is not what endures. Only pain

endures. And the rhythm of pain. (Wright & Lehman, 2008, p. xvii)


Becoming sited: The quest for identity in place

The sited Me. Ortega y Gasset’s famous philosophical exclamation, “I am

myself plus my circumstance” goes straight to the heart of being a regionalist. Of course,

it applies to more holistic aspects of modern life, but in the regionalist sense, one cannot

formulate self identity without factoring in place. There is no such thing as ego without

site. While they can be separately analyzed and discussed as discrete entities, they are in

reality an inseparable admixture. And, of course, simply making the statement (say it

aloud to yourself) focuses your awareness on the place your feet are touching and its

critical importance to your well-being. We are always sited, even if the site shifts often,

and patterns elude our consciousness. Any sense of one’s self as divorced from place and

worldly circumstance, able to freely negotiate a universal space and exert agency across

sociocultural and economic boundaries, is simply a mirage and one of the failed

promises of the modernist dialectic. This principle of not having a frame of reference

through which to see yourself without place is a powerful one. Ortega was a harbinger of

the environmentalist movement to come.

Lippard describes the process of “becoming sited” when life as an artist is

inevitably peripatetic (as is the case with the ‘visiting artist’ who must readjust to place

in order to create):

Most artists today come from a lot of places. Some are confused by this situation and

turn to the international styles that claim to transcend it; others make the most of

their multicenteredness. Some of the best regional art is made by transients who

bring fresh eyes to the place where they have landed. They may be only in

temporary exile from the centers (usually through a teaching job), but they tend not

to waste their time bewailing their present location or getting away whenever

possible. They are challenged by new surroundings and new cultures and bring new

material into their art. As Ellen Dissanayake has observed, the function of art is to


“make special”; as such, it can raise the “special” qualities of place embedded in

everyday life, restoring them to those who created them. Yet modernist and some

postmodernist art, skeptical of “authenticity,” prides itself on departing from the

original voices. (Lippard, 1997, p. 36)

She continues, later, in a discussion about visiting commissioned artists:

A “place ethic” demands a respect for a place that is rooted more deeply than an

aesthetic version of “the tourist gaze” provided by imported artists whose real

concerns lie elsewhere or back in their studios. Suzanne Lacy describes a spectrum

of artists’ roles from private to public as experiencer, reporter, analyst, and activist.

But to make an effective art of place, an artist must be all of these things. The field

is necessarily interdisciplinary. (Lippard, 1997, p. 278)

Not that all ‘outsider’ art is bad, says Barbara Allen, and not that all design work

done for remote clients in areas unfamiliar to the designer is bad. In fact, there are times

when having an outsider’s eyes can be useful:

…”performative” regionalism emphasizes the fact that architects often come to

projects as outsiders, not part of the culture for which they design. Requiring a

deeply cultural and perceptive understanding of everyday life as part of the design

process expands opportunities for cultural insight on the part of designers. Often

when one is inside one's own culture, its norms are invisible. It is difficult to see the

things that define us. It can take an outsider, a "valuable stranger," to see the

cultural behaviors that locals do not. (Allen, 2007, p. 426)

This is of particular interest to the graphic designer as well. Since graphic design

as a discipline has little content of its own (as opposed to architecture), designers are

usually outsiders, “content vampires” who reconfigure the messages most often

provided by a client, but sometimes co-authored by the designers, to produce a new

visual communication. It is to be assumed, then, that graphic designers must always be

honing their skills of observation to these cultural behaviors outside of one’s immediate

region and always be developing deeply cultural perceptions about everyday life for


others to whom they may not immediately relate in order to be successful at this kind of

nomadic design practice that is “performative.” She alludes that this may indeed be a

viable middle ground for regionalist practice in a globalized and networked world.


Chapter three: PRINT’s Regional Design Annual

Short history of the Annual

Figure 4: PRINT magazine Regional Design Annual covers, 1996-2006

No discussion of regionalism in graphic design could avoid the major repository

of purported knowledge of “regional” influences and difference across America that

PRINT magazine publishes once a year in a massive competition awards volume called

the Regional Design Annual (RDA). The annual started in 1981 as a response to the

rapid decentralization of design talent across America from cultural centers and their

major advertising agencies. The advertising industry is still the nexus of American

graphic design. Try as many people might to break these ties and free graphic design to

become a kind of ‘social art’ under its own free agency, the field started in advertising

and is still, for the most part, beholden to the commercial realm for its lifeblood. Of

course, the ‘design’ of visual communication can be traced back to prehistoric pictures in


caves and probably beyond, but advertising is where graphic design became a modern

profession.

Figure 5: First PRINT RDA cover, 1981

The RDA was established to begin to track this emigration of designers to all

reaches of the country and catalog their work by location. This has been the primary

differentiator of the RDA from other annual design competitions—that it’s work is not

grouped by categories like brochures, annual reports, websites, packaging. Rather, by

grouping the work of designers whose home bases are situated in specific regions, the


RDA has become both an archive of tracings of ‘regional’ work and a useful resource for

designers and potential clients who are looking to either find a job or find a designer to

hire in a specific area. Joyce Rutter Kaye, PRINT’s editor, writes in the introduction to a

retrospective DVD of the RDA from 1996-2006:

PRINT’s Regional Design Annual is the first and only comprehensive survey of

graphic design organized by location. The Annual was conceived in 1981 to address

the rapid decentralization of the advertising and design industries that were taking

place at that time. Reports in early issues of PRINT illuminate how quickly talent

dispersed from large design centers to smaller ones across the country, and how

dramatically this creative diaspora redefined the work being produced. This

phenomenon was mostly due to large, influential ad agencies spawning numerous

local spinoffs, startups, and imitators, but it also resulted from the effect of having

that distinctive “style” captured, all in one place, in the pages of a national

magazine.

Over the years, the forward march of technology and globalization enabled agencies

and design firms to become less reliant on local clients, and the awareness of

international design trends expanded their vocabulary of creative references. Despite

this smoothing out of boundaries and borders, however, regional differences have

always remained distinctive, as have the ways that designers respond to the

particular demands of their local markets. Year after year, following the trajectory of

local activities has allowed us to gain invaluable insights into design’s big picture.

The sheer volume of competition entries to the Annual—25,000 pieces in a typical

year—yields a fairly accurate barometer of emerging trends, stylistic shifts, and

conceptual conceits being practiced regionally and nationally. (Kaye, 2007)

It is precisely these “regional differences” and “ways that designers respond to

the particular demands of the market” in Kaye’s notes that are of interest here. If the

RDA was originally meant to track regional design’s distinctive flavors that are sited in

place across the country, the questions remain: (1) what exactly are the differences such

a comprehensive annual survey of work has recorded? (2) how have designers’

‘responses to local market demands’ shifted over the 30+ years of the RDA? (3) is


anybody going the other way and narrowing their vocabulary of creative references,

perhaps to become more regionally specific?...the possible questions arising from such a

goldmine of visual data from years of RDA entries is lengthy but the answers are rather

opaque. Except for introductory ‘analysis’ texts before each region’s entries, written by

hired freelance writers each year who focus on one region each, it is left for the viewer of

the RDA to sift through the years of published winners to extract their own answers to

these questions based solely on what the work looks like (hardly the only, or even best,

criteria with which to holistically judge design work and its impact).

Figure 6: PRINT RDA 1981, Midwest - Minnesota

In fact, many designers have wondered whether the RDA needs to exist in its

present form at all anymore. Many feel that the usefulness of regional categorization of

selected entries has long since past because there is little to no perceptible difference in


the work (see the following discussion of Lorraine Wild’s critique of the RDA). The

theory goes that if you covered up the location heading on the page and the text

descriptions of the design submissions, you would be very hard pressed to name any of

the regions from which any of the submissions emerged. That is testament to what Kaye

claims is happening in regard to globalization—the forward march of technology allows

designers to be less reliant on local clients and smooths out boundaries and borders

while international awareness allows designers to expand their vocabulary of creative

references. These have seemed like positive things to designers over the years, allowing

them to compete on an ever-growing stage. But the point can also be made that it is the

quest for universal visual language inherited directly from modernism by which they can

compete with broadened geographic reach, and this enables and even promotes a

divorce between designer and place while sterilizing the visual cultural landscape of the

regional differences Kaye claims to still exist.

Summary of regional differences, 1981–1999

Luckily, the former 40-year editor of PRINT, Martin Fox (who won the 2004

AIGA Medal for his years of service to the graphic design industry), took it upon himself

to assemble a summary of regional difference notes in his introduction to the 1999 RDA

issue. It was the last issue of the millennium, and like many others who were inspired by

the momentous date shift, he wanted to do something to look back before wondering

what was ahead. Instead of writing the usual yearly summary, he decided to hand-pick

statements from all of the introductory texts that had been written for the RDA from

1981–1999, specifically looking for nuggets of wisdom that described the regional

differences in graphic design noticed by the RDA’s judging panels over the years.


In planning the first RDA issue in 1981, PRINT conducted conversations with a

number of designers to find out what they would want to see in such an issue and how

they felt about the regionally grouped content. Fox’s findings are remarkably frank

about designer’s attitudes toward regionalism:

Regional characteristics? “The conventional wisdom today is that there are none,” we

stated in the introduction [of the first 1981 RDA], “at least not at the highest levels.

‘Regional’ is viewed by many as a pejorative term, meaning insular, unsophisticated,

corny—adjectives which might apply to work turned out by hacks but never by

designers and illustrators of the first rank. These top-level people are considered

supra-regional; they have the talent, confidence, and authority to compete nationally

or internationally with their peers from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or anywhere

else on the globe. And what presumably enhances their ability to do so is the fact

that they have divested their work of any ‘regional’ characteristics that might give a

client pause.” (Fox, 1999, p. 69)

There couldn’t be a more point-blank admission that competition on any supra-

regional scale coerces designers into adopting ‘universal’ visual language (read:

modernism)! Fox goes on to select a year-by-year selection of trends, some of which are

excerpted here, culled for their direct relation to ideas of regionalism (Fox, 1999, p. 69-

72):

1981. California North: “Design as practiced in San Francisco and the Bay Area

tends to be more cerebral, more introspective, and more decorative than in Southern

California. There is a sense of the artist’s hand as opposed to the mechanized

impersonality of the airbrush (which can render many illustrators interchangeable).”

Dallas: “The design, neat, clean, and hard-edged, is notably rich in detail. Despite

the rigorous technical control, it is imbued with a sunny, buoyant quality that makes it

fun to look at; it entertains.”


1982. “While cowboy culture, Texas chic, and the prairie look may constitute the

Southwestern style in many eyes, these fashionable fixations are waning.”

“One development still too much in its infancy to have had any overt effect in the

look of Eastern graphics is the gradual involvement of designers with computer

technology.”

1984. “Fred Woodward, current art director of Texas Monthly magazine,

observes that ‘in spite of the decline of “Texas chic,” the most effective thing you can do

here is tap into that Texas mythology of cowboys, cafes, and the dusty trail.’

Interestingly, it is the persistence of these icons that encourages designers like

Woodward to look to illustrators in different parts of the country. ‘The only way to

present this mythology in a fresh way,’ Woodward explains, ‘is to bring in people who

have never done it before.’”

1988. “Although some work from the Southwest is imbued with local imagery—

cacti, jalapeño peppers, and cowboy hats—design in the region is becoming increasingly

impersonal and pragmatic—just what the client wants. The ‘Dallas look,’ which once

predominated, has virtually disappeared.”

“Much-lauded Minneapolis advertising, with its recognizable style (pithy

headlines, arresting visuals) yet variety of approaches, has drawn many creatives from

outside the area to this city once considered ‘isolated.’”

1991. “The most important story of the first years of the last decade of the

century is the dispersal of design and its practitioners, which shows every sign of

continuing into the decade, and at such a pace that one wonders whether, some years

hence, the term ‘major design center’ will have any but the most nominal meaning. The

high-tech revolution has fueled the geographic revolution, if it can be so termed. The


ubiquitous fax machine and the computerization of design offices, to the point where

designers can communicate with clients modem to modem, rendering geography

irrelevant, have shaken the field free of its traditional moorings and turned it into a kind

of cottage industry.”

1992. “Computers—or rather the irresponsible use of same by designers who

should know better—are also being blamed for a certain amount of visual pollution.

Designers note that typographic quality has suffered serious setbacks and that there is a

growing backlash against the computer-generated look.”

1996. “The advent of digital technology and its instantaneous links to the rest of

the world has seemingly heralded the retreat of the regional esthetic. ‘I don’t believe

such a thing exists,’ says Mark Schwartz of Columbus, Ohio-based Nesnadny+Schwartz.

‘Communications and technology are too fast these days.’”

1998. “The much-vaunted electronic communications boom has profoundly

affected the Midwest region. Designers not based in major centers like Chicago or

Minneapolis no longer feel at a disadvantage. Dory Colbert in Columbia, Missouri,

states, ‘Technology helps me work out of my home with clients all over the country.’

Sonia Greteman in Wichita, Kansas, has also expanded her client base with a little help

from e-mail. ‘Because we’re living in an electronic age, we can stay competitive, even

though we’re in the middle of the Middle West,’ she says. ‘I have clients as far away as

Nicaragua and Costa Rica.’”

Critique of the 2005 Annual: Lorraine Wild

The sheer size of the RDA competition dwarfs that of all the other annual graphic

design shows in America. It is an enormous undertaking for the PRINT editorial staff,

and it takes months to catalog the work, go through first rounds of in-house judging to


narrow the selections down to a third or fourth round before bringing in a guest panel of

celebrity judges for a weekend of final selections. This methodology is, of course, open to

criticism of its own in bringing potential anti-regionalist bias into the process before

final selections are even made by visiting judges. One can only assume that the criteria

being used by in-house PRINT editorial staff to cull the weakest work out and winnow

the enormous pile into something manageable each year has been not only variable

based on the staff involved, but also probably biased toward the modernist interpretive

agenda that favors rationalism over emotionalism and neutral universal visual language

over that which is subjective, personal, or vernacular in nature.

Whether educated designers actually create works in a neo-modernist vein or not,

they still overwhelmingly adopt its rational principles in criticizing the work of others.

Design schools across the country have made quite sure of that! The Bauhaus still looms

very large in the planning and evaluation of creative work in classrooms from coast to

coast because it remains the most predominant, coherent, and complete theoretical

system by which supposedly ‘objective’ criteria can be transmitted to students and

subsequently used in checklist fashion to grade the resulting work. It just makes things

easier for teachers who would prefer not to get involved in students’ “personal journeys”

toward voices that may be more authentic to their own grounded experiences and deep

knowledge. To most design teachers, that should be left for the therapist’s couch; it has

nothing to do with the tidy rules of square against circle, pica against point size.


Figure 7: PRINT Regional Design Annual 2005, Minnesota

It was precisely these kinds of enigmas and frustrations that prompted Los

Angeles designer and educator, Lorraine Wild, to write a rather scathing critique of the

RDA published on the influential Design Observer blog on November 27th, 2005 after

reading the issue while on an airplane (Figure 7). All of the following excerpts are from

this blog post, and her critical analysis is followed by a spirited response from a number

of luminary designers whose names are listed with their comments. Their discussion


reveals a great deal about prevailing attitudes towards regionalism and its value among

leading design practitioners (Wild, 2013).

Lorraine Wild, posted 11.27.05 :

Flying from New York to Los Angeles last week, I spent the long hours at 35,000 feet

doing something I had not done in years: I read Print Magazine's "2005 Regional

Design Annual" cover to cover. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Tech has re-bounded in Utah.

• North Carolina is home to designers who emphasize the importance of offering a

comprehensive branding program.

• San Diego is home to the most consistently happy designers from year to year.

• Firms that aren't “weighed down by a large number of employees” are doing well

in Virginia.

• And ... Indie rock band posters are channeling Marcel Dzama and Edward Gorey,

no matter where they're from.

Why did I even bother?

Editor Kaye offers a sort of editorial disclaimer in her introduction: "Technology and

globalization," she writes, "has enabled agencies and design firms to become less

reliant on local clients, and the awareness of international design trends has

expanded their vocabulary of creative references." Such a cultural climate, let alone

a tacit admission of this new, globalized state of affairs, would seem to trump the

very "regional" particularities that Print's editors want to believe they're defining for

us—a fact that's perhaps most evident in the actual entries themselves.

…

Today, designers and their clients identify themselves by engaging in practices that

are framed by "regional" issues, yet their business is often directed, ultimately, at

bigger audiences; the success of those regional designers depends on their ability to

visually communicate on a national or even international level. It may be, too, that

the designers or agencies who enter competitions like the Print "Regional Annual" are

already within a subset of designers deeply invested in working at the national/global

level. Or maybe that's just the work that Print's in-house team responds to, since it's

"professional" and appeals to contemporary, even more visually-savvy audiences.


…

[in the 2005 RDA] There's not much in the way of inspiration, nor is there a

significant amount of out-and-out crap. This flattened-out picture of design drawn by

Print's in-house jury is probably a result of their desire to be "fair and balanced," to

give each type of work it's due: and in doing so, each part of the country is

indistinguishable from the next. Even J. Abbott Miller's cover of the current Print,

with its faux-airline hub-and-spoke map, slyly alludes to the dulling effect of global

uniformity, using the most banal of contemporary designed experiences [taking a

commercial flight] to convey the state of the (design) arts.

Figure 8: PRINT Regional Design Annual 2005, Wisconsin


Wild finishes by suggesting some changes to the annual that might improve its

relevance among designers, including: (1) group the work by genre instead of region

where the designer is based to illustrate the diversity of practices (as opposed to just the

resulting creative works) rather than their uniformity, (2) arrange the works selected for

the annual by more descriptive categories for better comparison, say all insurance

company communications together or all wedding invitations. Her last suggestion is the

most relevant here:

…assign each area a single writer who hails from that particular region, and give

them the freedom to capture the gestures, the nuances, the cultural specifics that

frame the work — if indeed they do. Of course, in the end it will still all be fictional,

but no more so than the idea that designers who live in Kansas City are any different

from those who live in Brooklyn.

The following excerpts are the responses that various designers contributed to

the conversation over the course of about two months after the original post. Their

names and post dates are provided, and the conversation reveals mostly denial that

regionalism even exists in graphic design, if not doubt that it is even a compatible idea.

The opinions conveyed reveal an underlying preoccupation with visual style that is

typical of the field, but also occasional suggestions for bringing content and the holistic

client service cycle into the evaluation process:

aj. 11.28.05 at 12:45

Great summing-up of what, I suspect, all too many designers think when they pick

up the regional design annual, myself included. There is some value in seeing how

other designers approach a particular challenge, and when you're, say, a one-man

home-based design studio, you might not have time to see what your peers are

doing.


As the Internet did to music (and now television), the need for self-appointed

gatekeepers like Print cannot help but be diminished by its ability to directly connect

creative people together - through portfolio sites, blogs like this one, Flickr, even

Google Image Search.

Michael Bierut. 11.28.05 at 09:39

The Print Regional Annual is flawed in the ways that Lorraine describes, but because

has the advantage of working like a quota system, you will see work that that you

won't see anywhere else (and sometimes shouldn't see anywhere at all.) For all its

problems, we really don't have a better snapshot of where the national graphic

design scene is in any given year.

I agree that the attempt to discuss the work in terms of regionalism is futile at this

point. [my emphasis] I was interviewed by a good writer (DO's own Tom Vanderbilt)

for the text for the New York section, and I was embarassed [sic] by my inability to

draw any kinds of coherent conclusions about "trends in the New York design scene."

It didn't help that the few regional trends I was able to conjure up—the design

enthusiasms of the Bloomberg administration, for instance, as evidenced by the

excellent design surrounding the city's (failed) bid for the 2012 Ollympics [sic]—were

nowhere illustrated in the pictured selections. This is always the flaw in attempting to

"curate" a competition when you don't control the submissions.

I also agree with Design Maven about the myth of New York dominance, although

Print certainly bought it back in the day. As I recall, the original Regional Design

Annual didn't have a section on New York. I guess the theory was that all the other

issues during the [year] were “special New York issues” by default.

DC1974. 11.28.05 at 01:20

I agree that there has been a flattening of design, where things that I would have

identified as so NorCal -- graf influence, hand drawn type -- several years ago are

popping up in New York, Philly and Baltimore. I do think that there are regional

trends, because of the influence of schools and the local scene. Designers may be

connected via the internet, but in the end we respond to our immediate colleagues


and peers locally are doing. And that is how we take global trends and put our local

spin on it. Globalization is a myth. [my emphasis] The idea that you aren't influenced

by that sign you read every day on the way to work, that there aren't local music

cultures (hey, when was the last time you heard Go-Go outside of DC?) and other

specific spacial [sic] and regional concerns and constraints.

Look at Tennessee for instance in 2005 Regional Design Review, here's a whole state

that has been incredibly influenced by traditional graphic printing and typography.

Yee-Haw in Knoxville and the traditional printing background of Nashville has been

enormously influential in attracting people to the region. When I look back 20 years

ago and think of what I think of as quintessential 80s design (when I was just an

elementary school student), I realize now that much of that "look": torn paper, neon

was coming out of Northern California, but I had associated it with a national trend.

Having a "Regional" issue then reminds of us again that we aren't as globalized as

we fictionalize and that ideas have a starting point. (And for those of us who are just

starting are careers, it's also a great phone book, of where to send our portfolios if

say we want to leave Northern California and move to Philly.)

Joyce Rutter Kaye. 11.28.05 at 03:23

Thank you, DC 1974, for pointing out that regional styles do exist (and continue to

emerge) and affect design culture in a powerful way. And thank you, Michael, for

pointing out the value in having a national snapshot once a year.

I suppose if the RDA's value to designers is declining, we'd see it in the numbers, but

it's actually our best-selling issue of the year. Last year, we sold 75% of copies we

placed on the newsstand (a 50% sell-through is considered excellent). I don't deny

that teasing out regional differences is becoming more and more of a challenge for

us, but I do think that many designers across the country are still very interested in

seeing who's doing what in their local community, as well as seeing what's being

done elsewhere.

Derrick Schultz. 11.28.05 at 03:40


My issue with the Regional Annual has never been the Regional, but rather the

Annual. While I realize the business community moves much faster than it used to,

the difference from year to year never seems very drastic, especially when it comes

to the writing portion (which i find far more interesting than the work showcase).

If I were to take Lorraine's approach and offer a solution, I would rather see the

Regional annual be done every two years, with the opposite year devoted to the

European Annual. It would show a larger shift in "style" and probably more

segregation in economic outlook.

And while I’m in a dreamers mood, perhaps developing the European Annual into an

International Annual. I feel there’s [sic] far more cultural aspects that could be

written about in a full-on world annual and it would showcase more diversity that

would really challenge design instead of being just a showcase. (I realize I have

neither the budget or time constraints Print works with.)

Samuel E. Vazquez. 11.28.05 at 06:53

I have to agree, in part, with Ms. Wild. I too picked up a copy of Print Regional

Design Annual and was quick to put it back on the rack. Not much in it was inspiring.

Yes, there's a lot of work done these days but that's where it ends. I rather read

about functionality and how the work impacts the desired audience. I realized years

ago that design is not about me. The moment you see me in the work I do, I've done

a bad job. It's about the client and its audience. Designers basically interpret the

way information is presented. If you want to see design at its best look at European

design. They don't scream "look at me -- I need glitter to look pretty -- please stroke

my ego." They do what they do and don't make a big deal about it. They don't

obsess about it.

p.berkbigler. 11.29.05 at 10:43

I'd think the other important trends to watch within the magazine are the body of

contributors that just seem to make it in year after year without much question - is

this simply an instance of Print officially deciding which designers / firms they know


have a good track record and are "safe" bets, is it recognition of tenure within the

field, or is it just boring judging on the part of Print and their annual judges?

It's clear that Print is still including names that haven't appeared before, but I'd be

seriously curious to know what the ratio of design standards / stand-bys vs. new and

notables is within the past 25 years worth of publication...


The goal of the Annual is to provide a comprehensive overview of design being done

in this country. When judging the 25,000 entries over the course of 3 months, we

are not choosing work based on any particular agenda—we are not trying to favor

past winners, nor are we sifting through to find work with a specific regional flavor.

We are merely trying to find the best work possible from the work that's submitted,

period. We actually do not divide work into regions until the third and final round of

judging. if a particular region in the book shrinks in size from one year to the next,

it's because fewer viable entries were submitted from that region—we don't fill pages

for the sake of filling them.

Considering the sheer volume of the entries, and the relatively few that make it in

(1200 or so), it's actually a pretty selective annual, and I think it stands as a fairly

accurate barometer of the quality-level of work being done in this country. Is it

perfect? No, but we're always trying to make improvements, in the way we solicit

entries, select the finalists, and report on the regions. It's five solid months of hard

work for a team of only seven people, and I think it works pretty well.

marian bantjes. 11.30.05 at 03:32

There seem to be 2 basic tracks of complaint in the commentary here. One versus

Regional, the other versus Annual.

Myself, I'm more interested in the regional.

[quoting Joyce Rutter Kaye above] nor are we sifting through to find work

with a specific regional flavor. We are merely trying to find the best work

possible from the work that's submitted, period. We actually do not divide

work into regions until the third and final round of judging.


This is, I think, what dilutes what little regionality there is [reported to be]. I actually

think, from a regional perspective, that it would be more interesting to represent the

Good, the Bad and the Ugly from each area to see if any patterns emerge. I suspect

that it's at the smaller, local level that any regionalism might be evident. It might be

the perception of "excellence" that doesn't recognize quirky, individualistic work.

I'm intersted in the regional thing because we at the GDC were recently looking at

the entries to our Graphex awards for any sign of Canadian influence. I also hosted a

panel with the judges (Rick Poynor, Debbie Millman, Tan Le, Min Wang, Robert

Sarner) on the topic (Nov. 18), and received a surprising amount of hostility from

the audience (both during and after the event) for even asking the question.

Canadians, it seems, are desperate to be so worldly that their work is

indistinguishable from anyone else's. I find this a pity...and very Canadian.

But still I have to wonder how living in a specific culture, with specific politics, local

religions and ethics, a generality of types of business and industry, plus schools and

leaders in the design community can not affect the way we work and the way we

choose to represent our local clients.

Although our panel and the Graphex judges' largely failed to turn up anything

peculiar to Canadian design (in the all of 36 hours they had to think about it), the

emphasis of the judging, as in Print, was on "excellence" in general.

So if I have advice for Print, it would be, next time do focus on regionalism and see

what happens. I think it might provide a more interesting issue.

Lorraine Wild. 11.30.05 at 10:08

I was somewhat surprised that Joyce Rutter Kaye revealed that they only sort the

work out by regions after they have culled the work to be published. Thinking of that

giant pile of 25,000 entries, I understand their practical reasons for doing this, but it

seems like it has to be part of the problem, at least the one I'm the most interested

in, which is the "regionality" of the Print Regional Annual. The process of simply

ordering their edited choices geographically clearly doesn't yield a "regional" picture

that is very convincing.

I don't think that there is anything crooked about the jurying of the Print Regional

Annual; in fact, if anything, I think it isn't manipulated enough to deliver a more


vivid picture of what may in fact be going on in Las Vegas, Louisville, or even New

York. It is not a surprise that the issue sells well, because the prospect of looking at

design regionally remains interesting. But for Print to actually deliver on that

premise, a degree of creative strategy beyond what the editor describes as their

current process seems necessary. (What that strategy should be is, of course, a

question).


If you're seeking excellence during judging, the regional influences that do exist in a

given area will naturally emerge. I think it's dangerous to apply preconceived notions

to an area of what its regional characteristics are. If we were looking hard for

sunshine and oranges in Florida, for example, we'd be missing the recent emergence

of screenprinted rock posters in Orlando. Selecting work that adheres to regional

clichés over work that shows a higher level of design would be doing readers a

disservice, in my opinion.

marian bantjes. 11.30.05 at 12:16

Joyce: I, for one, am not advocating applying preconceived notions of a region to the

collection of work, but rather looking at the work for patterns or themes that might

then be identified as coming from that region.

For instance in Graphex, Tan Le noted that Canadians do a lot of Government work;

he and Debbie both noted a use of unusually bright colours; and everyone noted that

the work coming from Quebec was riskier and more conceptually driven than from

anywhere else in Canada (to the point that one could take one look at the piece and

immediately guess it was from Quebec—even without an indication of French

language).

I would like to think that a judge from outside a region could look at something and

say "That's unusual, I don't think that would work too well in [LA]." and the regional

judge could say, "Really? I see stuff like this all the time." or, "Well, that's a direct

reference to [something locally cultural]."


Patrick Larson. 11.30.05 at 01:24

I wholeheartedly agree with Lorraine and Art in the fact that the regional annual is

simply a mishmash of those wanting to enter another contest regardless of where

they are from.

I don’t think globalization has anything to do with it but rather the design shops

culling from annuals to create their direction (read: copy)

I think regional design annuals should be limited to smaller shops in smaller

markets. Like Duffy and Anderson did with Minneapolis/Midwest in the early 90's and

Modern Dog/Sub Pop in Seattle/Northwest in the late 90s.

I don’t see regions really defining themselves in the larger markets such as NY &

California & Chicago since shops in those areas tend to have a more multi-cultural

influence (and client base) therefore the influences are broader in general. But, I

suppose, that may make for a pretty small annual.

JosiahQ. 12.01.05 at 08:13

I think local AIGA chapters should take over responsibility of submitting samplings of

area design work to Print.

The problem in my mind with something like Print is that relying on "submissions"

from the individual designer or agency means your sampling pool is inherently

limited.

By extending the responsibility of pulling in samples to the local AIGA chapters (who

then in effect function as small editorial boards), you can create a tradition of

chapters seeing their work represented nationally in comparison with the work of

other chapters in other regions.

Analysis of the designs as they relate to regions would occur, of course, by the Print

editorial staff, but not the choice of what items are shown in the annual.


Lorraine Wild. 12.01.05 at 12:58

…[I] am a new (or new-old) subscriber to Print, having also recognized that the

editorial direction of the magazine has been re-energized under Joyce Rutter Kaye: I

guess that's what led me recently to check out this latest RDA so closely. I

respectfully suggest that the RDA is another aspect of the magazine that needs fresh

thinking. There has to be something between their current process described and

defended by the editor (but which ends up looking just too random) and the reliance

on pre-conceived notions or local visual cliché. As this thread has gone on, I am

thinking that the answer lies somewhere in regional reportage that is focused, and

which helps guide the selections. It also might mean actually pursuing entries

pertinent to an idea rather than just relying on what comes through the mail slot, if

only to re-invigorate the issue.

Patrick Larson. 12.01.05 at 01:59

…is there some way that regionalism can be demonstrated on a global scale? I know

there are international annuals but I think on the local levels there is just too much

cross pollination from various areas to make a viable excuse for such specificity.

greg. 12.01.05 at 02:56

Regarding the question of global regionalism, I've found myself pretty impressed by

the original work coming out of Print's European Annual, when compared to the

American one. Maybe American design is going through a dry spell right now. Maybe

I'm part of the problem. My wife loves me anyway...

Scott Bower. 12.18.05 at 01:16

I think an international annual would be much more interesting, especially since so

many of my designer friends were kicked out of the country in the last 3 years and

have taken what they learned here back to Thailand, Japan, South America, and

Eastern Europe…


It seems designers are doing more and more work that tackles problems with

information systems design which has nothing to do with the style. Like an accurate

visualization of a trade going through the New York Stock Exchange. Would that ever

make it into Print's annual? No. The design firm was in Atlanta, the client was in New

York, and I live in a remote third world country (Kansas City).

How does globalization and universal access to our toolsets effect design? Well, it

means that I was outbid on designing Bangkok's Fashion Week because they found a

local rock star designer to do it for a fraction of what I bid, and it was at a discount.

Physical location means nothing now, even on small projects.

Ellen Lupton. 01.12.06 at 05:58

I don't understand the nostalgia for an authentic regionalism. Too bad, isn't it, that

people got their phones, cars, computers, FedEx, and NetFlicks [sic]. It's a shame,

but there's no going back. It's these things that allow me to live in Baltimore but

work in New York City (well, maybe not the NetFlicks).

An important function of the Print Regional Annual is to help people who are looking

for design firms (for a job, for a client, for a designer) in a particular location. Not

that location matters all that much any more, but some people do want to live

somewhere where there are other designers.

It seems clear from the conversation above that graphic designers do not take the

same view of the content of their field that architects do of their own. Plainly, I think

architects believe in the power of place more than graphic designers, probably because

they spend their time making them and graphic designers largely do not, but it’s more

than that. There is a conviction among environmental designers that placemaking is

integral to the actual content of the design—not a shell to hold or present it—but actually

steeped in its material substance. And it’s about social justice and responsibility, even

legal responsibility which graphic designers do not bear. It is disappointing to me that


most graphic designers don’t seem to believe that their work can be rooted in a place,

streetwise down to a neighborhood block, and still cosmopolitan enough to read as well

in Europe as it does here. It seems as though the idea of format is as far toward place as

they are willing to go when other concerns are higher priorities.

Perhaps it is simply the permanence of a building and its primal connection to

very innate human instincts to shelter our lives that makes architects and planners

concerned about philosophical issues related to reality, simulation, and place. In reading

the bulk of writing done about graphic design, one can surmise that, as a profession, it

rests on the depths of most intellectual inquiry and resulting critical practice on

concepts like the user, the interface, authorship, and their impact on form. One cannot

excuse graphic design for its part in perpetuating placelessness in our culture through

its relentless promotion of commercial brand spaces which by nature tend to marshal

our senses away from deep connection to real places simply because the profession is so

integrally tied to commerce for its survival. Architecture, too, is hugely economically

driven, only the stakes are much higher on multi-million dollar building projects, the

stakeholders more varied, and the politics far more complex. By that measure, architects

should chuck “place” like a bucket of nails and head for the nearest design-build exit to

cash in. But they do not. The tradition of phenomenological inquiry that runs from

Heidegger through Christian Norberg-Schulz, Christopher Alexander, Kenneth

Frampton, Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Edward Relph and others is as strong as ever in

architectural theory circles. And in light of our newfound preoccupations with virtual

space, this tradition is becoming reenergized as an antidote to cultural drift.

I want to insist to graphic designers that place does matter, that where you come

from as a designer matters because it enriches the very identity against which your


internal creative forces push. Most importantly, I want to say to graphic designers that

they are so preoccupied with what design looks like that they fail to recognize how

deeply the rooted knowledge of life in a place affects your ability to process content and

create a meaningful marriage between content and visual form—the primary activity

which cuts across all modes and categories of graphic design. Perhaps the “regional”

differences we should be looking for in a publication like the RDA are not so easily seen

on the surface, and perhaps can’t be seen at all, outside of the time and place when the

piece was initially active within a particular cultural circumstance which has since

changed and which skews our perception of its communicative power. What about

looking for how designers in a specific place harness literary and rhetorical devices to

connect texts to imagery? Perhaps in the Midwest, and for certain industries, this tends

to be done in a very earnest and warm way whereas in California, a slicker and more

bitingly humorous approach tends to be preferred. This might say as much about the

regional people as the visual style involved, and indeed, in the words of Wendell Berry,

regionalism pertains to life as much as creative work and it pertains to life before

creative work.

It should be added that the place in which your design will be received matters,

too; that your knowledge of the place your clients inhabit matters if you want to

represent them in a deeply intuitive way, and that the places we collectively promote

with our creative works as allied designers across disciplines matter greatly to our

culture as a whole.

We have largely allowed both the internet and networked global economic

systems to flatten sociocultural diversity and to weaken our sense of rootedness as

people before we are designers, and the myth that designing for anyone anywhere in a


virtually interconnected world represents limitless opportunity is an illusion of abstract

market systems. The hidden truth is that it also represents profound and grave

challenges. Buying into the power politics of globalization in order to compete only

advances the erosion and commoditization of design services across the globe by

coaxing designers to abandon their uniquely sited personal perspectives and wisdom in

favor of cranking out more universally translatable products that will continue to get

them far-flung jobs. That cycle is vicious and insatiable. This is the cultural inheritance

modernism has left us in a globalized world, not the utopian and fundamentally

optimistic wish for all people it once was. But we have the ability to step back from these

abstractions and deepen our roots in the real world without hiding our heads in the sand

to ignore technological advance. Ricoeur teaches us that the only way to survive the

violence of globalization is to encounter other civilizations in our most fully creative and

flourishing state, which doesn’t start over there. It starts here, the place your feet are

touching right now.


Chapter four: Case study—International Viola Congress 2010

Introduction

The case study graphics shown here were designed by me over the course of

about eighteen months from late 2008 through the event in June of 2010 under the

direct guidance of the IVC’s coordinators, Catharine Carroll and Dominic DeStefano.

The project is not offered as an illustration of ‘best practices’ in regional design per se,

for indeed, I had to make choices due to practical constraints at times that are at odds

with a regional approach to the work. Rather I offer it as a vehicle for discussion and

critique since it was an event sited in the region I know best (Midwest / Cincinnati), and

the content and venue lent ideal conditions in which to explore the typical conflicts

designers face between local content, voice, and global audience. With the perspective I

have now on the design work shown here and the theoretical issues discussed in the

present writing, I can revisit the design concepts, content development, and project

management factors with fresh eyes. Here I can share my recollected internal thought

processes in the hopes that it might spur other designers to construct similar narratives

of their work against their own experiences and inspirational sources.


Figure 9: CCM village at night, site of IVC 2010

Concept and content development

The 38th annual IVC 2010. After my initial meetings with Catharine and

Dominic, I began to review the event itself. The International Viola Congress has a long

and rich history of exciting venues across the globe. Not only has the event been held in

many far-flung and exotic locations (often a different continent every year over thirty

eight years!), but it also seems to continually draw an impressive roster of world-class

musicians, regardless of the travel demands involved. I wondered at first how such a


conference could manage to sustain itself given the rather paltry salaries musicians

suffer in the United States, much less that of students who regularly attend for the

chance to win scholarships to major music festivals and the invaluable master classes

with famous teachers.

I soon realized that this event is held dear to the participants not in small part

due to the very instrument they play. The viola is slightly larger than the violin but

smaller than both the cello and double bass which are played upright instead of on the

shoulder. And it has suffered the brunt of many jokes over the years due to its second-

class status among soloist ranks to the higher-pitched and more glamorous violin. There

are very, very few solo vehicles across the major orchestral repertoire written for viola.

In fact, many players wind up playing pieces originally written for other instruments on

the viola (Bach’s Cello Suites, for example). And so, for viola devotees, it becomes a

question at these conferences of how to keep such a small repertoire fresh, to take an

aging and rather static body of works and inject them with new energy for the next

generation of string players who might also discover the viola’s charms.

The English composer and violist, Cecil Forsyth (b. 1870–d. 1941), explained that

in the old days, “viola players were selected merely because they were too wicked or

senile to play the violin. Those days are happily gone forever” (Forsyth, 1914). In a witty

counterpoint, the great Scottish viola soloist and teacher, William Primrose, famously

shortened his previously long-winded explanation of the differences between violin and

viola to a tart catch phrase: “The viola is a violin with a college education.” It is a little-

known testament to the viola’s status as the soul of the string section that many of

history’s greatest composers preferred to play it instead of the violin when performing

ensemble music, including Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn,


Dvorak, and Britten. After realizing the instrument’s underdog status, I clearly wanted

to give the IVC a distinguished logotype mark that would showcase the viola in a unique

and dynamic way among the string family.

Cincinnati and Rome: Classical music and civilization. In beginning

research into background content, I started with geographic location and region. My

discussions with Catharine and Dominic regarding the viola and its history had already

primed me to orient the content development toward mining the past for inspiration

and looking for ways to update it, to make it feel contemporary without falling on the

sterile, placeless, and overly rational side of ‘modern.’ I couldn’t help but grapple with

the word “classical” and how it relates to both music and architecture.

Figure 10: Cincinnati Bengals football stadium

Figure 11: Rome’s Coliseum

It’s a bit of a poverty to refer to the entirety of Classical music using that word

since it is most accurately applied to one small historical period in the spectrum of

musical history, the time of Mozart and Haydn. Nonetheless, all music which runs down

from this tradition of writing for the instruments of the orchestra shares this moniker as

well as a common vocabulary of forms (symphony, canon, madrigal, concerto, etc.) At


the same time, the word “classical” in architecture, at least in the Western tradition,

refers back to the architectural language and forms of ancient Greece and Rome. There

is a remarkable overlap in conceptual content and even the terminology used to access

similar concepts between the fields of music. Common concepts between the fields with

the very same names include pitch, rhythm, articulation, scale, intonation…Indeed, the

famous American architect Louis Kahn was famously quoted as saying, “an architect is a

composer.” (He spent his young days making money playing piano to accompany silent

films and once told his mistress, Harriet Pattison, that if things hadn’t worked out for

him in architecture or piano, he thought he might have made a very good composer.)

Figure 12: CCM’s skylight ‘oculis’

Figure 13: Rome’s Pantheon with oculis


And so, Rome came into my view as a connective tissue that binds Cincinnati to

the musical content of the IVC and to the site where it would be held. It turns out that

Rome and Cincinnati have a remarkable amount in common. The two are sister cities,

both built, according to folklore, on seven hills. There are a number of cities with a claim

to being built on seven hills, but the connection here goes further in that Cincinnati is, in

fact, named after the famous Roman countryman farmer, Cincinnatus, who became the

temporary ruler of Rome twice in moments of need during wartime, but abdicated the

attendant power and status that went with the office to return to his regional way of life.

It couldn’t be more appropriate to the content here, in light of Regionalism, to leverage

these Cincinnati–Rome ties to metaphorically represent “the old becoming new again.”

Figure 14: CCM’s new plaza grand stair

Figure 15: Rome’s Campidoglio


I managed to find the original article that explained the “City of Seven Hills”

nickname for Cincinnati in the June 1853 edition of the West American Review, which

listed the seven specific hills that made a rough crescent shape around the growing city

as: Mount Adams, Walnut Hills, Mount Auburn, Vine Street Hill, College Hill, Fairmont

(now rendered as Fairmount), and Mount Harrison (now known as Price Hill)

(Anonymous, 1853). Initially, the seven hills of Rome were occupied by small

settlements and not yet grouped or recognized as a city. The residents of the seven hills

began to participate in a series of religious games which started to bond the groups

together. The city of Rome evolved as these disparate settlements began acting as a

group, draining the marshy valleys between them and turning them into markets and

public open spaces. Of the seven hills of current Rome, five (Aventine, Caelian,

Esquiline, Quirinal and Viminal hills) are populated with monuments, buildings, and

parks. The Capitoline now hosts the Municipality of Rome, and the Palatine Hill is an

archaeological area. The now-famous Vatican Hill (Latin Collis Vaticanus) is northwest

of the Tiber and is not one of the Seven Hills of Rome. Likewise, the Pincian Hill (Latin,

Mons Pincius), to the north, and the Janiculum Hill (Latin, Ianiculum), to the west, are

not counted among the traditional Seven Hills either. The connections outlined here in

the physical site of the conference and its sister city, Rome, the seat of classical

civilization in our collective American memory, could provide interesting sidebar

content running through the conference collateral materials and potential for unique

naming opportunities of event venues throughout the connected building complexes.

The CCM village: Study in old and new. The immediate site of the

conference was the College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) “village” campus on the south

edge of the University of Cincinnati’s urban Uptown campus. It is a site I knew well


since my days as an undergraduate architecture student across the same campus in the

Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning college building, also a famous landmark

building by Peter Eisenman. The CCM complex was constructed by the firm of Pei Cobb

Freed, with partner Henry Freed leading the design team, in six phases over a seven year

period ending in 1999 (Figure 16). It had been under construction during nearly my

entire undergraduate tenure from 1991-1997, so I was aware of the project’s design

intent (I had seen renderings) and could track its progress whenever I visited the

building for concerts. For an architecture student, I spent a fair amount of time there

because I took piano lessons, music history, and opera classes during my first year and

was a regular attendee of student recitals and the free orchestra concerts.

Figure 16: CCM - old and new literally connected

I remember clearly being interested in the project for the way it eschewed the

predilection most builders have for demolition and starting over with a blank site.


Instead, Cobb determined that some of the existing campus fabric should remain, and

they should instead build only one major new building, leaving essentially three others

to be stitched together by a large substructural parking deck that created a large

irregular circular plaza on top:

Critical analysis determined that existing performance and support spaces should be

renovated, the existing academic wing replaced, and an abandoned gymnasium and

obsolete dormitory rehabilitated for use by the school. This strategy permitted a new

academic wing to frame one side of a new courtyard, creating the spatial focus for

the buildings, new and old, which now constitute CCM's "village" within the larger

campus. (Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, 2013)

Figure 17: CCM plaza above substructure parking

But, perhaps I was at first a little disappointed as a design student that the

complex seemed rather “tame,” and that no big architecture statement was being made.

Cincinnati is a very conservative town and is notorious for disallowing architectural

projects deemed too progressive from penetrating the urban fabric, especially if the

materials don’t defer to its masonry-laden history. Even the great Frank Gehry was

forced to produce his signature swooping curved surfaces normally rendered in titanium


panels instead in brick for his Vontz Center for Molecular Studies which opened on UC’s

East Medical Campus in 1999 along with the CCM village. I guess I wanted fireworks,

and the Cobb CCM design seemed so quiet. Now I see that the incursion Cobb made into

the site was a quite tricky balancing act between the needs of the college, an enormously

complicated site condition that incorporates many grade changes, the desire to preserve

what fabric was solid and would provide continuity in the memory of the community

who inhabits it, but also an injection of new and contemporary architectural vocabulary.

Two fundamental ideas govern the design: a) the environmental quality of a campus

— indeed of any community — can be significantly enhanced by the imaginative

reuse of existing buildings together with new construction; and b) the first obligation

of any campus building project, beyond providing required facilities, is to shape

attractive gathering places, interior and exterior, that will engender a sense of

community and shared purpose among all who experience them. (Pei Cobb Freed

and Partners, 2013)

Figure 18: CCM village in UC campus context


Figure 19: CCM Werner Recital Hall lobby Figure 20: CCM Alumni Garden

It is rare for signature designers who have access to international clientele to

advocate in raw terms for the ‘imaginative reuse of existing buildings together with new

construction’ in order to preserve a local and regional character, but that is precisely

what they managed to achieve, and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) agreed,

giving the project a 2001 National Honor Award:

The AIA jury called the CCM Village “an imaginative reuse of existing buildings that

provides an attractive interior and exterior gathering place for performing arts. A

complex program is given urban form through a simple yet strong design…details of

public circulation spaces are effective through the restrained palette of materials and

colors used.” (Throm, 2013)

When asked for a statement by the awards jury, Cobb offered:

“When I first visited CCM, I was struck by the extraordinary vitality of the life there

and the equally extraordinary miserableness of the environment," notes Henry N.

Cobb. "It seemed a great shame that activities so inherently and exuberantly

creative, so life-enhancing, should be taking place in such a deadly environment. In

creating a new campus village for CCM, we've ended up converting what was one of

the worst places on the campus into one of the best. This transformation is what I'm

most proud of, because we created something positive for the whole University, not

just CCM.” (Throm, 2013)


Figure 21: Old reflected in new outside Mary Emery Hall Figure 22: Old framed by the new above Werner Hall

It is precisely this kind of staging for the activities of life which architects discuss

in a regionalist way that is missing from contemporary graphic design debate—the effect

of place on the life of those sited there who are not transient and gain intimate

knowledge through repeated experience. It is true that most graphic products are meant

to operate on a far shorter time scale than that of architecture and usually to be far more

disposable, but their drawing directly from regional life and cultural identity need not be

any less deliberate, supportive, or profound.


Figure 23: Werner Recital Hall interior Figure 24: CCM auditorium / classroom

Figure 25: Main Corbett Auditorium interior Figure 26: Corbett Auditorium lobby

Janus & polychromy: Gods in color. I began to revisit the CCM campus at

the beginning of the IVC design process and look closely again at the physical space and


watch people use it: their walking patterns across the public plaza, the shadows cast

across the brick pavers surrounding the central tree by the modern spherical traffic

bollards that govern pedestrian to car interaction, the places along hallways where

students chose to sit and rest with a book bag or cell phone. It occurred to me that most

of the existing architectural fabric that Cobb chose to retain in the renovation amounted

to a typical vague mélange of “college Gothic” brick buildings peppered with watered-

down classicist ornament so often seen in American architecture without exhibiting any

cohesive allegiance to the classical language in a holistic sense (Figure 27), tied to

planning, elevation construction, and spatial sequences, much less the classical Orders

(Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite). In short, they are kind of “fauxthentic”

classical structures in revival styles from throughout the centuries. It’s really all mid-

century construction with a fair amount of white stone thrown in to “make pretty.”

Figure 27: “Classical” CCM buildings to house “Classical” music

I wanted to see how I could use graphic design to reinject a strong dose of

“classicism” back into the content development—in effect, to amp up the existing


classical vocabulary shared by the renovated parts of the conference site’s fabric so they

can more effectively balance the modern underpinning of the new village complex and

reassert a new sense of classical music and its potential within contemporary culture.

The question was what ‘classical’ even means anymore and whether that language could

be presented in a way so as not to be lost on a contemporary audience completely.

Figure 28: Pediment ornament, Dieterle Vocal Arts Center

Figure 29: Entrance ornament, Dieterle Vocal Arts Center

Figure 30: Ornament, Memorial Hall Figure 31: Gargoyle, Memorial Hall


So, I asked myself what these buildings might have been like if they really existed

back in the Roman empire. How would the community have used them, and what gods

might they serve? In looking at the moulding carvings for clues (Figure 31), I stopped at

the heavy gargoyles carved into the former Memorial Hall dormitory building that now

houses musical practice rooms and offices and immediately thought of Janus, the

Roman god of doorways. Janus was the only two-faced god because he could look

backward into the past and forward into the future at the same time, and Roman

builders would often place his bust sculpture above doorways on both sides with a

different countenance on each. He was essentially the controller of comings and goings,

of the transitions among seasons, the keeper of peach and opener of gates. His unique

capabilities and perspective made him the perfect patron saint for IVC, so I adopted him

and decided to develop a secondary Janus mark that would embody the emerging theme

of renewing the old and the dormant in the conference.


Figure 32: Janus – old & young Figure 33: Arch of Janus, Rome

This passage from A. S. Kline’s (2004) translation of Ovid’s Fasti sheds light on

the ancient Romans’ understanding of the god Janus:

Book I: January 1: Kalends

...

Two-headed Janus, source of the silently gliding year,

The only god who is able to see behind him,

Be favourable to the leaders, whose labours win

Peace for the fertile earth, peace for the seas:

…

The ancients called me Chaos (since I am of the first world):

Note the long ages past of which I shall tell.

The clear air, and the three other elements,

Fire, water, earth, were heaped together as one.

When, through the discord of its components,


The mass dissolved, and scattered to new regions,

…

Whatever you see: sky, sea, clouds, earth,

All things are begun and ended by my hand.

Care of the vast world is in my hands alone,

And mine the governance of the turning pole.

When I choose to send Peace, from tranquil houses,

Freely she walks the roads, and ceaselessly:

...

I sit at Heaven’s Gate with the gentle Hours,

Jupiter himself comes and goes at my discretion.

So I’m called Janus.

…

We praise the past, but experience our own times:

Yet both are ways worthy of being cultivated.’

(Kline, 2008)


Figure 34: Janus coin Figure 35: Janus, both bearded

It also struck me during my photography of the site and subsequent study that

not only were the “classical” buildings on the site employing a dilute and abstracted

stylistic version of the classical language, but they were also misquoting its sense of

color! I remembered reading in architecture school about the inauthentic inherited

visions of antiquity in most people’s minds: ruins of ancient buildings, all crumbled

piles of pure white marble leading us to believe that if we could just restack the marble

pieces somehow, we would see the restored architectural glory of the ancient Greeks and

Romans as it was lived.

It turns out that this is a fiction which was only promoted after the discovery of

ancient white stone sculptures during the Renaissance and magnified by centuries of

romanticized ideas about classical antiquity ever since (Figure 36). Only in recent

decades have archaeologists and art historians completed scientific analysis and


reconstructions of what ancient classical sculptures and buildings really looked like

when they were new, and it’s rather shocking to our contemporary eyes! (Figure 37)

They were incredibly bright and saturated with color painted onto their materials using

earthen mineral pigments.

Figure 36: Traditional conception of white antiquity against the reconstructed painted reality


Figure 37: Classical column and entablature as reconstructed in color


Figure 38: Sculpture with paint remnants intact

Figure 39: Boy’s face reconstructed in color

Figure 40: Decorative tablet showing vase before and after color reconstruction

The following passage from the program written for a massive 2008 Harvard

University Art Museum exhibition of these classical polychromy reconstructions makes

clear the mistaken sense we still hold about the past (Karl Deutsch’s definition of a

nation) which we inherited in such a distorted and incomplete way. For a thoroughly

detailed discussion of the polychromy debate, imagery of the Harvard reconstructions,

and scientific analysis, see the book Gods in Color (Brinkmann et al., 2007).

“When asked which of his works in marble he liked the most, Praxiteles used to say:

‘Those to which Nikias has set his hand’—so highly did he esteem his coloring of the

surface.” This anecdote by the Roman writer Pliny about the fourth-century BC Greek

sculptor Praxiteles reveals that it was common practice in ancient Greece to finish

marble statues with paint. It also indicates that the painted decoration was

considered an integral part of the sculpture, and that it could be carried out by

skilled painters.

…

The written testimony about painted stone sculpture and statues made of bronze as

well as gold and ivory undermines the notions of white marble sculpture and pure

form traditionally associated with classical antiquity. Past and present archaeological

and scientific observations point in the same direction, and lay the basis for

increasingly plausible reconstructions of the colorful appearance of ancient sculpture.


…

The ideal of unpainted sculpture and of unadulterated contour and volume took

shape in Renaissance Rome, inspired by the finds and early collections of classical

marble statues, such as the Laocoön Group discovered in 1506. These were denuded

of their painted surfaces by prolonged exposure to the elements, burying conditions,

and often, most likely, a good scrub upon recovery. With the works of Michelangelo,

white marble sculpture was established as the noblest of arts. It was greatly admired

in the neoclassical period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when ancient

Greek sculpture was regarded as the ultimate expression of “noble simplicity and

quiet grandeur,” to use the famous phrase of the German art historian Johann

Joachim Winckelmann.

…

Polychromy in modern sculpture hardly startles the contemporary viewer, but we still

have not come to terms with the painted marble sculpture of ancient Greece and

Rome. With only meager traces left on the surface and the occasional drill hole for an

attachment, it is difficult to imagine a fully colored sculpture, complete with additions

in other materials, such as metal attributes or eyes inlaid with glass and stone.

However, modern technology can now make visible what cannot be seen with the

naked eye, and the color reconstructions in this exhibition are based on information

resulting from detailed scientific study and analysis.

…

Ancient texts provide detailed information about the pigments used in antiquity.

Actual pigment remains may be identified by various techniques, including polarized

light microscopy, X-ray fluorescence and diffraction analysis, and infrared

spectroscopy. Most pigments were of mineral origin, such as red and yellow ocher,

the bright red mercury sulfide cinnabar, the copper carbonates azurite (blue) and

malachite (green), and the synthetic Egyptian blue, a copper calcium silicate. White

was derived from lead or lime, black from carbonized bone or other materials. The

use of organic pigments, such as red madder and murex shell purple, is also

attested. Binding media were organic and tend to be harder to identify; there is

evidence for egg, casein, and wax.

…


When inspired by nature, color adds a lifelike quality to sculpture. In the ancient

world, this quality was also desired for statues of bronze: overlays of reddish copper

accentuated lips and nipples, silver covered teeth and nails, and gold highlighted

ornamental details. Color further characterized body and costume, and, in the case

of reliefs, enhanced the contrast between figure and background. At least for stone

sculpture, the Greeks followed the Egyptian convention of depicting women with

lighter and men with darker skin. For Greeks and Romans, dazzling colors were an

essential ingredient of the trouser suits of Persians and other Eastern barbarians,

just as the prestigious purple denoted the dress of rulers, for example the military

cloak of the Roman emperor. As sculptors often left details to be rendered entirely in

paint, reconstructing the original surface may provide important clues to the

meaning of a work.

…

Most ancient sculpture, whether depicting human or divine subjects, is incomplete

without color. Only with the Renaissance did white or monochrome sculpture become

a paradigmatic form of artistic expression. As we now know, this phenomenon would

have startled ancient sculptors such as Praxiteles—just as the color reconstructions

of ancient statues startle us today.

(Ebbinghaus, 2007, p. 1-7.)


Figure 41: Roman wall mosaic Figure 42: Cincinnati Union Terminal mosaic detail

Figure 43: Roman floor mosaic Figure 44: modern Rookwood tilework

The polychromy of sculpture that was incorporated into architecture with the

magnificent classical freizes of antiquity also extended into housewares and decorative

arts like pottery and mosaic (Figure 41). Here again, there is a connection in the

traditions of Rome and Cincinnati (Figure 42). The intricate mosaic tile installations

uncovered throughout the Roman empire by archaeologists form the canonical roots of

Cincinnati artisan works like the famous Rookwood pottery company’s brightly colored

(and now very valuable) tile housewares and public mosaics (Figure 44), a little-known


mosaic installation in the Peck Federal Building in downtown Cincinnati by graphic

artist Charlie Harper (Figure 45), and the enormous Art Deco mosaics of American

workers that line the blazing polychrome interior rotunda of Union Terminal (Figure

48).

Figure 45: Charlie Harper’s Peck Federal Building animal mosaic in downtown Cincinnati

Figure 46: Harper mosaic detail 1

Figure 47: Harper mosaic detail 2


Figure 48: Union Terminal brilliant polychrome interior with vast Art Deco glass mosaics

Collateral materials design

The mark and identity system development. When starting out to design

the IVC logotypes that would be used in collateral material to identity the event, I

wanted to create a system with enough flexibility to accommodate any last-minute needs

with ease but that also gave the viola the kind of dignified status it deserves but does not

enjoy. I decided that the “secondary architecture” of the system would probably need to

play a near-equal role in the materials as the primary logotype and so I left the Janus

head (Figure 50) to play that swing role while setting out to design a primary mark.


Figure 49: Janus arch, coins, bust, and graphic translation


Figure 50: Janus icons, Janus phases - metaphorical ‘mythology’


Figure 51: Janus typography new / old constructions


My attention turned toward the instrument itself and the iconography associated

with it. I researched the craft of “luthiers” (makers of guitars and string instruments)

and found a set of measured scale drawings of three very famous and priceless

Stradivarius instruments, which piqued my interest given my architectural background.

I wanted to see the construction drawings of the viola in detail. The feature that most

interested me was the “f-hole” which allows air to escape the instrument as it resonates

with sound waves. It is a very specific shape that has been experimented with endlessly

by craftspeople, but has attained a certain standardization through trial-and-error.


Figure 52: IVC Mark – String instrument F-holes


I precisely traced the f-holes of all three—a violin, a viola, and a cello—so I could

study them comparatively (Figure 52). I began by comparing their sizes and stacking

them to look for variations or interesting interplay of their shapes when juxtaposed in

layers. The size of the violin and viola f-holes are quite close to each other, while the

cello f-hole is far larger, which stands to reason given the much larger size of a cello. I

decided to focus the viewer on the viola mark and have the violin and cello play

supporting roles for a change by leaving the viola f-hole solid while using outlined

versions of the violin and cello f-holes. Since the cello mark was so much larger, I cut out

much of its midsection and left the more active ball terminals at the end, and finally

allowed fragments and echoes of the violin and cello marks to weave over and under

each other and the viola mark, sometimes solid outlines and sometimes reversed

outlines from the solid viola mark below. This created a dynamic and vibrating

collection of related linear and curved elements (Figure 53) that could be cropped and

magnified to create ‘secondary architecture’ asset forms of the mark (Figure 54) for

different applications like business cards and letterhead. The alternate forms were

distributed throughout the individual application pieces so as to create enough levels of

variety that viewers could only experience the entire system with repeated exposures in

different formats over time. Finally, the primary mark was revisited and rendered in a

polychrome treatment according to the IVC color palette (Figure 55).


Figure 53: IVC mark construction


Figure 54: IVC ‘secondary architecture’ assets and primary mark crop fragments


Figure 55: IVC primary mark with polychrome treatment


Walking the line: UC’s brand identity. As with most major college

campuses, a brand identity system is in place at the University of Cincinnati that

dictates certain non-negotiable guidelines for the use of the university’s logo, color, and

naming components. They are usually rather dry, miserable affairs focused more on

raising the level of compliance to basic minimum standards of communications quality

from the lowest performers throughout the organization than they are on inspiring the

higher performers to capture the spirit of the institution in creative or dynamic ways. It’s

usually about the “branding police” mentality long before it’s about giving identity

stakeholders guidance on visual tone of voice that encourages pushing boundaries.

Of course, the problem with such systems is that they inherit a lot of the

hegemonies of the international style’s system thinking in perpetuating the myth that

merely slapping the same logo on every communications piece in the same corner in the

same colors and using the same font will create “identity” that is not only accurate but

that builds community, invokes rich traditions, and draws out latent alumnal memories.

In practice, branding guidelines tend to lobotomize their users into resigning the

presentational and design aspects of communication to the nameless automatons who

bore the rules and go haywire when they’re broken. It’s a disease of thinking that

spreads throughout an organization when enforced from the top down rather than

collectively built from the bottom up each and every day.

Fortunately, the IVC event was being funded through external channels and

CCM’s own general fund rather than university monies, so the UC Creative Services

(a.k.a. the “branding police” in this scenario) did not hold much jurisdiction in this case,

other than that the university’s facilities were being used for the event. Nevertheless, my

intimate familiarity with the UC Brand Guidelines (Figure 57) after years of designing


graphics for the DAAP program in various capacities was useful in reinterpreting the UC

identity along the IVC identity system’s lines and ensuring that the UC logo and name

assets were used in a way that was compliant to the letter of the law, but also aspired to

uphold its intended spirit in a fresh way.

Figure 56: UC website showing red/black and “swoop” theme


Figure 57: The UC Branding Standards manual


Figure 58: IVC stationery as reinterpreted UC brand identity without direct reference


Color palette. As described in the debate about classical polychromy in

sculpture and architecture, the color palette adopted for IVC is one that could have been

achieved by ancient techniques of crushing natural minerals into durable pigments that

would be painted onto the pristine white surfaces we still tend to think of as “classical.”

The modernist palette we have inherited from the international style tends toward

neutrals and stark contrasts, with isolated “pop” colors used for accent, especially red.

It’s no mistake that more architecture firms throughout history have used red and black

as identity colors than any other combination. And, surprise—UC’s primary colors are

red and black.

The IVC color palette inspired by this research into classical decorative arts

exhibits a connection to earth and materiality that supports the regionalist mission of

connecting to place in a quite literal way (Figure 59). Color throughout the ancient

world could only have been “regionalist” in that modern technology for standardizing

color reproduction didn’t yet exist. Predominant regional colors would have varied with

the available natural materials found there and with the seasons as organic sources

bloomed and faded.


Figure 59: IVC color palette


The particular colors adopted here for IVC were sampled directly from the

brilliant digital catalog reproductions of Harvard’s “Gods in Color” exhibition whose

images would surely have been produced with relatively accurate reproduction methods

since color was the main content of the research driving the exhibition. They exhibit

what one would probably describe as a certain grayness or flatness compared to super-

saturated primary Crayola colors of today’s modern color imagination, which helps

mitigate their unbridled application across the poster, business cards, and event

program’s backgrounds and information graphics.

Figure 60: View of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district looking toward UC’s campus atop Clifton hill

Since Cincinnati is filled mostly with traditional masonry construction (Figure

60), the earthen character of the classical palette derived from natural pigments much

the same way we still make brick is entirely appropriate. The “brilliants” palette of

ancient colors reference very directly the unique architectural assets found in


Cincinnati: the downtown Findlay Market (Figure 61), many Victorian rowhouses in the

Over-the-Rhine district (Figure 62), and the rotunda of the Union Terminal building

(Figure 63).

Figure 61: Findlay Market’s polychrome palette


Figure 62: Victorian townhouses in Over-the-Rhine

Figure 63: Union Terminal lobby showing polychrome “sun”


The guest artist’s headshots were also duotoned in the range of natural colors

from the IVC color palette and placed in a grid on the website’s “artists” page to

resemble a long mosaic tile installation (Figure 64) reminiscent of the Cincinnati-Rome

connections and also representing a scaled metaphor to the digital pixel as a unit of

information. The poster application also provided an opportunity to apply this brilliant

color palette across the typography system in an unusually energetic way (Figure 65).

Figure 64: IVC website Artists duotone mosaic Figure 65: IVC poster typographic color


Figure 66: IVC poster polychrome type Figure 67: IVC poster polychrome mark with UC logo

Figure 68: IVC program book polychrome mark


Typography palette. The typography palette adopted for IVC was a source of

internal debate and struggle, but also delight in exploration and application since

typography is probably my first love in graphic design. I instinctively wanted to develop

a type system for the event that would be recognizable and comfortable with an

international classical music audience, but that would also somehow embody the

Midwestern ethos of humility and practicality, a quiet elegance rather than haute

couture glamour.

I settled on two main “display” typefaces for conveying the conceptual identity

components of the system and another two “text” faces for much of the heavy

information lifting in the program book and concert programs where most of the

conference’s lengthiest texts would reside. The two display faces were Didot (Figure 69),

designed in digital form by the New York foundry of Hoefler and Frere-Jones (H&FJ)

based on the early 19th century “modern” French types of Firmin Didot (modern in the

sense of typographic history going back six centuries), and Gotham (Figure 70), also

design by H&FJ and modeled after the original hand-painted directional sign lettering

found in New York City’s subway system. The two text faces were Alright Sans (Figure

71), designed by Jackson Cavanaugh of Okay Type Foundry and Sentinel (Figure 72),

another H&FJ face inspired by the class of fonts known generically by the name of

“Clarendons.”


Figure 69: Didot specimen, H&FJ – New York


Figure 70: Gotham specimen, H&FJ – New York


Figure 71: Alright Sans specimen, Okay Type


Figure 72: Sentinel specimen, H&FJ – New York


H&FJ’s Didot is a marvelous digital font. It is an amalgam of the old and new that

was perfectly suited for the work at hand in conveying the IVC’s content. It is both

“classic” and capable of great fussiness, but also practical in that it is supplied with a

range of “optical masters,” meaning that multiple versions of the typeface (which would

have been originally produced in hot metal) are provided with names that indicate the

point size at which each is meant to be used to maintain a balanced and “tuned”

appearance throughout a work. The primary characteristic of Didot that generates its

classic character is a very high contrast in its stroke modulation; the difference between

its thickest and thinnest strokes within any given letterform is huge compared to most

fonts designed for use in digital contexts on screen and for printing on rather crude

desktop printers that are incapable of reproducing hairline thin strokes easily. I knew

that we would be paying for high-quality offset press printing of the bulk of the

conference materials and that we could do justice to the elegance and refinement built

into Didot. I would not have chosen this face if desktop printing equipment were going

to be used exclusively in printing the conference materials.


Figure 73: Didot uses multiple optical sizes to keep hairlines thin at any point size


Figure 74: Didot specimen setting IVC-specific text content


I also knew that many conference attendees would recognize Didot intuitively

through its associations with the high fashion world through art director Fabien Baron’s

legendary commissioning of H&FJ’s original design to be used in the overhaul of

Harper’s Bazaar magazine (Figure 75). In line with the international stature of the IVC

guest artists roster, Bazaar uses Didot to grace its covers in every foreign language

edition across the globe! (Figure 76) Perhaps more directly related to the IVC audience,

I also knew they would be familiar with typefaces very similar to Didot called “Bodoni”

types that are used throughout the musical publishing business in the scores and

manuscripts they are used to reading and using in rehearsal, particularly the staunchly

classic and ubiquitous “Urtext” editions published by the German house of G. Henle

Verlag (Figure 77).

Figure 75: Didot, developed by H&FJ for the redesign of Harper’s Bazaar


Figure 76: Didot on the covers of Bazaar & Vogue in Japan, UK, Spanish & Turkish versions


Figure 77: Didot in historic editions and modern musical scores


Figure 78: 1811 example of Didot in use


Figure 79: Didot in use in a 1902 edition


Gotham is one of those typefaces that has very quietly assumed a dominant role

in American graphic communications over the last decade. Its origin in the humble,

blue-collar sign painter’s letters in the New York subway lends the face its direct and

very unfussy appeal to contrast Didot almost as far as one could possibly contrast in

demeanor and outlook. Didot and Gotham together are rather like Cinderella and an oil

field roughneck going to the ball. Graphic designers love Gotham because it can carry so

many different kinds of text with equal earnestness, and every letter in the font is

eminently “usable”— there are no “wordstoppers” with so much personality that they

catch a reader’s eye as it trips over them. Designers love Didot because it automatically

grants class and establishment elegance to a message and also because it has a ravishing

italic.

Alright Sans is related to Gotham in that it is remarkably humble and

unassuming. Although its lowercase shapes are a bit closer to the Gothic (think Franklin

or News Gothic) than Gotham’s (no pun intended), its uppercase letters are nearly

identical to Gotham’s. One could almost use them interchangeably without distraction. I

decided to use Alright for the copy texts and leave Gotham for uppercase titling because

the lowercase of Gotham has always felt just too wide to me for comfort (a fact H&FJ

recognized by later releasing ‘condensed’ widths of Gotham), and it’s not a particularly

full-featured digital font for lengthy text setting. Alright picks up where Gotham leaves

off by sitting on the page in a more comfortable width and offering a full complement of

characters including small caps, automatic ligatures, and “ranging figures” (numbers

that go up and down like lowercase letters).

Sentinel is a reinterpretation and extension of the logic of “slab-serif” fonts like

Clarendon or “Egyptian” typefaces popularized in the early 1800s in Europe,


particularly London. Clarendons have a long history of use in America—the first

McGuffy Reader schoolbooks used a slab serif, and children’s wood block alphabets are

usually rendered in a Clarendon—and their affable, spirited nature but relatively clean

and simple construction makes them easy to pair with modern typefaces to add some

personality to what might otherwise be a stark or rather lifeless mixture of voices.

Sentinel was adopted for IVC because it fixes many of the difficulties in working with

Clarendon, namely the lack of different weights, lack of special characters like small caps

and tabular numeral sets, and worst of all, the lack of an italic counterpart. These added

features in Sentinel make setting complex texts far easier than with other slab serif

faces, but still retains their inherent charm. Clarendon has been used to very

appropriate effect in Cincinnati in the identity and promotional materials for Findlay

Market (many of which I have also designed over the years), the central downtown

farmer’s market where local foodies can socialize and shop in a truly regional experience

(Figure 80). For a complete history of Sentinel’s origins, the H&FJ website contains a

lively illustrated history of the functional problems they meant to solve with Sentinel’s

design. (Hoefler & Frere-Jones, 2013)


Figure 80: Clarendon (slab serif like Sentinel) in use at Findlay Market


As a regional side note to the story of IVC’s typography, I intentionally chose to

avoid the use of “blackletter” typefaces (the original “Gothic” calligraphic letters as

opposed to the more recent sans-serif “gothics”), perhaps best typified by Fette Fraktur

and often linked to Cincinnati’s local character through its strong German immigrant

heritage (Figure 81). Many designers looking for a way to connect to local cultural

history would jump on the idea of using blackletter much in the same way it is often

used in retail design settings for beer packaging and the like to play on consumers’

stereotyped sense of nostalgia. While it’s true that blackletter can be found throughout

the city in stone markers and building inscriptions still today, I feel that the best

arguments about the German use of blackletter long after it had fallen out of favor in the

rest of Europe rest mostly on the gothic letter’s functional rather than cultural identity

attributes. Its narrow width on the page made it ideal for setting German texts which

tend to have very long, compound words that lead to many lines ending in hyphenated

words when set in standard roman faces. Since no German texts would be included in

the IVC materials, the functional argument for its use was moot. And if so, why subject

international readers to the legibility difficulties inherent in setting event texts (except

perhaps a very few ‘display’ examples) in a script with which they are probably

unfamiliar?


Figure 81: Fette Fraktur, a prototypical German “blackletter”

But, more difficult and thorny was the issue of the cultural connotations now

attached to blackletter. Warranted or not, its reputation as being associated with Nazis,

skateborders, “goth” subcultures, Mexican storefront signs, and tattoo parlors is a result

of the tangled and confused history of its popular use (Bain et al., 1998). This reading

might be altogether different (in a good or bad way) among IVC attendees coming from


Europe where the history involved could run much closer to their personal experiences

than to mine growing up in rural Ohio. I wanted to avoid the cultural blurring and

potentially negative readings its use might impart on the text content of the conference

as well as to avoid pandering to a lowest common denominator of nostalgic clichés that

fall in line with Wendell Berry’s description of a regionalism based on pride and

predatory tourism.

Ornament and pattern. The history of H&FJ’s faces, especially the Hoefler

typeface, includes a great many fonts that celebrate their “ornaments”—characters

sometimes called fleurons or dingbats that can be typed in repeated patterns to create

decorative border elements like those often seen surrounding the title pages of classical

books and manuscripts. I viewed this ornamental typographic tradition as another

powerful tool, along with a polychromatic revival, for injecting the “classical” back into

CCM and the IVC identity system. I knew that I wanted to pay tribute to the long and

ravishing history of classic 18th and 19th century book printing by weaving ornamental

patterns through the program book and collateral materials like certificates and

individual concert programs (Figure 82).


Figure 82: IVC certificates using typographically generated ornamental borders


This part of the design process may have been the most unbridled fun for me as I

got lost for hours constructing fanciful interlocking and repeating patterns with

typographic characters in myriad configurations, including both halves of the Janus face

playfully tucked inside (Figure 83). The borders were useful on the collateral pieces that

I wanted to skew toward an “old” or “traditional” reading according to the IVC’s themes,

and the repeating surface patterns proved very useful in creating backgrounds to lay

under advertisements throughout the program book in order to unify and bind together

what would otherwise have been a cacophony of commercial messages, each with their

own visual domain on the page.

Figure 83: IVC pattern 1 Figure 84: IVC pattern 2, enlarged


Figure 85: IVC pattern 3




Poster and postcard development. The poster was the first real promotional

collateral needed for early marketing of the event to music schools and teachers all over

the country. And of course, it needed to be splashy enough to create desire and buzz

among viewers to be effective at garnering interest that actually converted to attendees.

We needed to send it out at least six months ahead of the event so the poster could hang

in public bulletin board areas, mostly in music schools to attract the attention of

students who would potentially pay (or get a school to sponsor them) to attend. This


presented the content development problem of having enough information to explain

and promote the best features planned for the event, but not overcommitted to events or

guests that may by adjusted or canceled by the opening date.

I was photographing Dominic’s own personal viola one day in the viola teaching

studio at CCM when I noticed the ultra-polished finish on the black baby grand piano in

the room. I had the thought to place his viola on the piano and start to photograph it in

tight crops that would eliminate the room background. I quickly recognized the

connection to the Janus theme in the doppleganger images of the viola that resulted: the

neck, tuning pegs, and scroll of the instrument were seen coming in from the edge of the

frame while the dark and less detailed underside of the instrument was clearly reflected

in the piano lid. The reverse image of the scroll perfectly mirrored its counterpart where

the viola and piano touched, precisely the way the Janus head is composed of two

opposing faces connected back-to-back. I knew instantly it would be the major image

that anchored the poster, and I would place the Janus seal directly over the contact

point between light and darkness, image and void.


Figure 89: IVC postcards


I carefully masked the image so it could float over a field of strong color and

placed a slightly diagonal “sash” shape across the poster to allude to a sense of royal

dignity and also to functionally designate a zone for the main titling separate from the

remainder text zone below. I also knew that I wanted to incorporate the f-hole mark at a

very large scale so that the nuances of its delicate interplay of echoing and fractured

shapes could be seen more clearly than when used at a normal size on the page. I placed

it in the color field background with a gradient fill that created shifting contrast from the

top of the poster to the bottom and also interacted with the sash element as if through a

spatially ambiguous prism. The color palette was drawn from the studied examples of

classical mineral pigment polychromy, and the chromatic effects were carried through

the typography of event and guest artist listings at the poster’s bottom. This final poster

format was repeated in multiple polychromatic color versions, and the design was scaled

down and the text reconfigured for production at postcard size for reaching larger

secondary mailing lists as well.


Figure 90: IVC poster, blue


Figure 91: IVC poster, red


Figure 92: IVC poster, green


Figure 93: IVC poster color variations


Program book development. The program book represented the greatest

technical challenge of the entire project. It is almost always the most difficult piece in

any event’s design scheme to create due to its large amount of content, coordination

with contributors, cost of production, and technical design requirements. The

conference program book essentially acts as a stand-in valet to the attendee when live

help isn’t available: it must wear many hats in as few pages as possible to keep costs

down but still provide conference attendees with all the information they need:

• Most attendees would not be familiar with the University of Cincinnati

campus or city setting, so maps, wayfinding, and public transportation

options not only around the campus, but also to off-campus hotels and

local / downtown entertainment and restaurants had to be provided.

• All of the conference offerings had to be organized in a master schedule

(which inevitably shifts up to the last minute before printing, and even

afterward!) with enough information to clarify each session’s content but

still be compact enough for easy reference and display in multiple sizes

and formats (an information design challenge).

• All of the conference’s many illustrious star musicians needed biography

listings, which presented a language barrier for many who provided quite

‘broken English’ texts that needed rewriting and editing.

• All of the event’s many sponsors and advertisers had to be accommodated

with ad space within the book (and many times, completely redesigned ads

commensurate with the aesthetic standards set for the event) without

destroying or disjointing the continuity of the reading experience and

hindering easy access to needed resources for readers.


• The entire program of thematic content underpinning the event had to be

evoked in the text, color, layout, information graphics, and printed feel of

the book.

• Beyond merely being functional, it must be interesting and hopefully

attractive enough to serve as a coveted keepsake souvenir of the

conference experience.

The first impression of the book made by the outer covers is critical since it sets

the tone for the reader’s initial contact with the event’s content. The front cover (Figure

94) is quite modern in its handling of layout geometry and typography, while still

incorporating overtones of ornamental borders and evoking common memory of the

classical past using a semi-transparent photograph underlay of the dual Janus viola

image (seen earlier by attendees in the postcard campaign). The use of the Didot

typeface at display size lends it sophistication and stateliness to the conference titling,

and Gotham, given its blue-collar roots, does the heavy information lifting. Also

depicted are the heads of Janus looking toward the left into the past and into the ceiling

of the Pantheon in Rome with its skylight ‘oculis’ or eye of God, and simultaneously

looking into the future toward the right and into a comparative photograph of a skylight

in the new CCM building by Pei Cobb Freed with its triangular skylight serving the same

ocular function in angular geometries centuries later. A full-spectrum gradient color

wash suffuses both “old” and “new” skylight photographs to tie them together

metaphorically into a continuous timeline in which present conference attendees can

visually situate themselves as not only observers, but active participants and

contributors.


Figure 94: IVC program front cover


The layout geometries of the front cover of the IVC2010 program was critiqued

and published in Dennis Puhalla’s 2011 book Design Elements: Form & Space where he

writes:

On the cover brochure for the Thirty-Eighth International Viola Congress, the image

area is defined by a strong vertical rectangle. Internally, a set of four squares defines

a larger square within the image area rectangle. With the inclusion of images,

typography, symbology, color, line, and shape elements, the content drives the

message. As in a musical score, the image reflects an underlying ordering system of

repetition, contrasts, and surprise. (Puhalla, 2011, p. 21)

The back cover was reserved, as is customary, for the premier full-page sponsor

advertisement area. This ad was custom-designed by me for the sponsor who submitted

only their contact information, and it was folded into the programmatic content of the

IVC by representing the “old” half of the theme’s duality while the front cover

represented the “new” and forward-looking thrust of the conference. I intentionally

modeled the back cover after 19th century book frontispieces, complete with their very

traditional centered titling schemes and florid typographic ornamental borders and a

flat, solid color scheme of sage green and gold, both earthen hues evocative of Greek

mineral pigments. Flipping the closed IVC program book back and forth in your hand

clearly illustrates the stark contrast of the duality set up in the content for the

conference—front cover: new, colorful, and dynamic—back cover: old, subdued and

traditional—while still leaving room for cohesive connections through color and type,

and not editing out contradiction or surprise.


Figure 95: IVC program back cover


Figure 96: IVC program front and back covers, old and new

The rest of the program book contains the bulk of the conference content: (1)

acknowledgements to sponsor, exhibitors, and organizers, (2) threads of content about

the connections between the IVC site in Cincinnati and its sister city Rome and the ties

between classical civilization and music and modernity, (3) complete information for

new visitors to UC and Cincinnati including transportation maps, (4) the master

conference schedule grid, (5) advertisements with custom page color backgrounds and

borders using IVC graphics, (6) information about the mobile-ready interactive

conference website, (7) complete guest artist bios, (8) complete musical concert

programs, and (9) blank space for note-taking during conference sessions.


The front matter uses a large-scale Janus mask and the small Janus phases icons

(Figure 99) to introduce the symbol that will bee seen around the CCM village campus

during the event on wayfinding signage and as a marker the event maps. It also

incorporates bilingual heading texts, in English and Latin, to further reinforce the

connections to antiquity (Figure 98). Throughout the rest of the conference materials,

bilingual treatments of headings, especially months and days of the week, are rendered

bilingually, paired with the Janus face to reinforce the old/new theme.

Figure 97: IVC program welcome spread


Figure 98: IVC program bilingual Latin-English with Janus phase masks


Figure 99: IVC program acknowledgements spread

The main conference schedule is where the connection to polychromy most

strongly intersects with the functioning of the program book. Along with featured

sidebar content about startlingly-colored classical sculptures, the schedule grid borrows

the ancient mineral pigment color palette to code events in the grid by type for easy

separation of the information layers presented. One can view the key to find the color of

all lecture events, concerts, or master classes, and then easily scan the program grid for

only those events that are most interesting (Figure 100).


Figure 100: IVC program event map and schedule spread

The first half of the program book was also printed, quite intentionally, in full

color on a glossy magazine paperstock to represent the modern tactile feel of a current

publication (Figure 101). The second half of the program was then printed with black ink

only on a cream-colored matte linen paperstock that evokes the tactile feel of a musical

manuscript. Again, the conference themes of history, memory (however mistaken or

conflated), and modernity are embodied by the physical corporeality of the book in

itself. This was not only an aesthetic choice, tied intimately to the content development

process, but also an experiential one stemming from my personal love of the feeling of

flipping through musical manuscripts with their smooth calendered high-quality acid-

free papers and beautiful high-resolution engraving. It became a touchstone for my own

personal recollection of a musical childhood filled by a great many joyful and engrossing


hours spent at the piano keyboard and later in school band rehearsals and the thrill of

drum and bugle corps competition fields.

Figure 101: IVC program center tactile paper change – glossy white to matte buff

The split nature of the book also directly connected it to the Janus head by

representing a technological fissure directly down the middle of the book’s content, the

first half being primarily about the present conference’s events still to come, and the

second half being about the listing of historical works to be played in the concerts,

information about their composers, and historical biographies of the past

accomplishments of the guest artists. And indeed, it was a very intentional economic

choice as a method of cutting cost in printing the program books—the most expensive

piece in the collateral system—since black and white printing on uncoated stock is so

much cheaper.


Figure 102: IVC program events listing title frontispiece


Figure 103: IVC program artist bios frontispiece


Figure 104: IVC program artist bios


Space and wayfinding. The environmental graphic designer in me was right at

home with the challenges of providing first-time visitors to IVC and the UC campus with

resources to find their way more effectively. There were many needs, including UC

campus maps, downtown maps and indexes of restaurants, a CCM village / IVC event

venues map, hallway directional signage throughout CCM’s three main buildings,

hallway display windows with schedule and map information, and connections to local

transportation from both campus and the conference hotel site on UC’s East Campus.

Figure 105: IVC CCM wayfinding signage map 1


Figure 106: IVC CCM wayfinding signage map 2

Most existing campus and CCM maps were either lacking in enough detail to be

used, or there was no existing digital original. So, almost every map used had to be

created by hand, and their labeled resources had to be researched through the UC and

various downtown Cincinnati websites. The CCM village complex also needed to be

walked to see every event site personally so I could understand common and easiest

routes to explain for conference visitors. Signage plans for the buildings had to be drawn

up and the required messages for each location written before design could begin

(Figure 105). The large easel-mounted hall directional signs that were left up for the five

days of the conference (Figure 112) and the easel signs placed outside the entrance doors

to each major nightly event (Figure 115) ultimately proved to be a great canvas for all the

work I had done in creating a neo-classical vocabulary for the event, complete with


background patterns and ornamental borders. They were seen enough and at such a

large scale that they helped to draw out and explain their use in smaller scales inside the

program book and in the subtle backgrounds of other collateral pieces like concert

tickets.

Figure 107: CCM event venue map


Figure 108: UC campus map


Figure 109: Public transportation schedules and campus map icon legend


Figure 110: UC campus map featuring IVC venue with Janus face


Figure 111: CCM event venue map in program book


Figure 112: Event wayfinding easel signage placed in hallways


Figure 113: Downtown Cincinnati hotels and dining options map


Figure 114: Off-campus dining directory and map


Figure 115: Easel sign for special event sponsor recognition


We were lucky in that CCM already had three sets of five large wall-inset display

cases along the main hallway of the conference which faced the most commonly used

rooms for seminars, lectures, and roundtable discussions. CCM was initially hesitant to

let us use these cases for IVC since they were each designated to different CCM

constituent groups and were already full of many small display materials that would be

difficult to remove and replace in exactly the same way. I developed the perfect solution

in measuring each door’s inset glass carefully and using a very inexpensive black and

white engineering plotter which prints on lightweight opaque bond paper to create

prints exactly the size of the display case door openings and then taping the prints

directly to the inside of each door frame (Figure 116). This completely covered the

contents of each case, and the backlighting diffused across the paper surface to

illuminate the graphics for viewers without disturbing the contents inside the cases in

any way. It provided a remarkably cheap and huge amount of surface area across the

fifteen display cases to thank sponsors and exhibitors for their participation, and

provide an enlarged CCM village map and IVC event schedule for reference each time

the hallways filled with attendees in between sessions.


Figure 116: Display case series 1 – map and schedule

Figure 117: Display case series 2 – acknowledgements


Figure 118: Display case series 3 – main titling with Janus faces

Figure 119; Display case series 1 installed


Figure 120: Display case series 2 installed

Figure 121: Display case series 3 installed, showing all three sets


Collateral event materials. The IVC demanded a great deal of collateral

support pieces beyond the initial marketing blitz of posters, letters, and postcards

mailed to schools and individual teachers across the country and also advertisements

placed in the major string magazines and journals six months leading up to the event.

To run an event with so many attendees from distant places required a full team of UC’s

event planning staff and CCM graduate students (Figure 122), and an array of printed

materials and merchandise including: concert programs, registration forms, swag

backpack bags, water bottles, paid event tickets that would be collected by volunteers,

banquet dinner table centerpieces, scholarship and competition winner certificates, and

staff nametags. All of these materials had to be designed and printed on an absolute

shoestring budget, so the university’s own in-house offset printing shop was used to

produce the program books while other collateral was either produced more

inexpensively online or printing manually (and often cut down by hand) by me on

desktop equipment.


Figure 122: UC Event Services staff at IVC registration

Figure 123: IVC merchandise and nametags


Figure 124: IVC event tickets and postcards


Figure 125: IVC event tickets


Figure 126: IVC concert programs, tickets, and musician rosters


Figure 127: IVC recording list, certificates, and table cards


Web design and event interactivity. The online and interactive strategy of

the IVC event was an area that wound up constituting a much larger portion of the

overall work than originally planned in design and implementation. Past IVC events had

used rather basic websites for the mostly administrative functions such events require

like marketing text of the event, advertising, online registration, and payment

processing. In planning the website and other materials with Catharine and Dominic, I

realized that we had the opportunity to help the IVC franchise take a quantum leap into

the digitally connected present. I saw that by leveraging the website (Figure 128) for far

more interactivity with conference attendees than ever before, we could not only enrich

their experience on site, but also provide a platform for extending the discussions

beyond the five day event timeframe and follow them back to their homes across the

globe with resources they could share with students and colleagues who were unable to

attend the event.

I knew that I couldn’t pull all of that off myself…I would need help! So, I planned

a strategy with Catharine and Dominic to assemble a group of tech-savvy graduate

students in the CCM music school who were already planning to attend and volunteer

for the event to become the blogging team (Figure 135). This meant that I had to

consider other administrative users of the website beyond myself, and that changed

everything in terms of design strategy. I could not afford to custom-design the site using

design tools that would render its update impossible for people without the same digital

skills and software. So, I had to design using the now-ubiquitous Wordpress Content

Management System (CMS), which would provide an easy-to-use administrative back-

end control panel that even uninitiated team members could be taught to use effectively

in only a few hours of training.


Figure 128: IVC website home page, full


Figure 129: IVC website home page, enlarged


Figure 130: IVC website home page feature article headers


Figure 131: IVC website polychrome article header system


Figure 132: IVC website banner ads for sponsors


Figure 133: IVC video page, full

Figure 134: IVC artist bios, full


The other advantage Wordpress provided was a huge number of existing users

who program and offer free plug-ins to the platform that could extend its functionality

with very little work on my part. For example, I was able to easily incorporate YouTube

videos and audio clips from master classes without having to worry about the browser

plug-ins end viewers of the website might have installed on their local systems. The

complex programming work to accommodate nearly every existing video / audio player

in use had already been done by scores of volunteer Wordpress community volunteers.

Perhaps more importantly, resources already existed to make the entire website

“responsive” to the wildly differing screen sizes of various mobile devices that might be

used to access the site. This means that when a viewer accesses the site on a cell phone,

its browser does not have to display a very tiny scaled-down version of what the site

would look like on a desktop computer’s large monitor, causing the user to zoom in and

scroll around to find content. Instead, the website would dynamically recognize the

screen size of every device trying to access the site, and send versions of each page that

changed the widths of text columns and the display of photographs to match (Figure

138), including “native” text that could be magnified according to the viewer’s

preferences for easy reading on a small device.


Figure 135: Blogging team training

Figure 136: Blogging team up and running

Figure 137: IVC mobile web poster Figure 138: IVC native mobile web menu system


The amount of content packed into the site wound up being enormous (Figure

139). For example, the guest artist listing page alone was almost a week’s work in

assembling! Every artist had a headshot that needed to be processed and sized for

perfect display, and multiple links to their artist management and personal websites

with biography information and audio recordings had to be manually assembled since

they did not provide it to the IVC, or did so in sporadic fashion. The blogging team

attended events and reported on their content as post articles in the blog, photo galleries

were uploaded and synchronized with Flickr (an online photo site), and session videos

were edited and posted to YouTube with links back to the IVC site (Figure 133).


Figure 139: IVC website blog articles


All of this content provided the opportunity to reinforce the IVC’s graphic themes

of old / new, classicism / modernism, and polychromy in antiquity. The backgrounds of

the site were assembled in both brightly colored and monochrome earth toned patches

of “digital mosaics” or tiles of color that metaphorically represented both the mosaic arts

connection between Cincinnati and Rome and the smallest unit of visual web page

information, the pixel. Different areas of the page displayed these ‘mosaic’ backgrounds

at different scales (Figure 139), lending the impression of spatial layering either closer to

the viewer or further away.

The guest artists bio page (Figure 134) was incorporated into this mosaic theme

by manually hand crafting “duotones” of every headshot using the IVC color palette

derived from polychrome classical antiquity. A duotone is a black and white image that

is also printed with one color of ‘ink’, usually on a printing press, so that the effect is one

of a ‘colorized’ photos much like that of a ‘sepia’ or brownish photo that is usually

associated with historic photography. Not only did this connect the headshots to the

idea of mosaics, history, and memory, but it provided a long and colorful tapestry of the

event’s roster which spoke to their rich array of experiences and perspectives the event

hoped to capture and share with attendees.

Event photos and video. Once all of the work designing the event was finished

and the event was underway, it was up to me, our team of graduate student bloggers,

and several UC audio engineers and technicians to document the conference sessions in

photographs and video. This was the fun part! We could participate in finally seeing the

event come to life and record it for sharing on the web. The following is a selection of

views representing the broad array of activities the IVC provided for attendees.


Figure 140: Masao Kawasaki and Catharine Carroll open the IVC 2010

Figure 141: Dieterle Vocal Arts Center is transformed into exhibition hall

Figure 142: The crowd begins to fill the auditorium for a gala recital


Figure 143: Roberto Diaz plays demo excerpts on many viola maker’s instruments for an audience

Figure 144: Luthiers’ wares on display

Figure 145: Discussing proper posture


Figure 146: Onlookers watch a master class

Figure 147: Student workshop on bowing technique


Figure 148: A lecture / workshop session gets participants involved

Figure 149: A roundtable discussion session


Figure 150: An accompanied master class

Figure 151: The IVC gala banquet

Figure 152: World-class performers filled the IVC roster


Chapter five: Methods for the regionalist graphic designer

Figure 153: Tadanori Yokoo - Japan

“Regional design aware of itself”

When asking how one can (or should) adopt regionalist principles, the obvious

question is where to start. My answer is that it starts not in the graphic design work at

hand, nor in the place where one lives, but in the mindset. I am essentially advocating

for a considered way of life in design as much as a regional movement. Berry relates

that regionalism pertains to life as much as to any creative work, and it pertains to life


before it pertains to the work. One must consciously identify with a place (Ortega’s

‘myself plus my circumstance’) and be aware of it as it is brought to bear on creative

output in order to explore the potential of regional design. Simply becoming more aware

of your surroundings is not enough; it must be applied and integrated, and waiting until

you need it as a sundae topping for your next project is too late. It needs to be there as

an awareness when you, say, prefer to shop at your local farmer’s market for produce

grown in your area instead of at a national supermarket chain so that the food takes on a

story, a sitedness, a person who you can actually see and know that grows it. Once you

can recognize Benedikt’s significance in the places where your creative energy dwells,

only then will you have the ability to call on it more effectively as a source—it will

become located for you.

Understanding local and regional life requires (1) a conscious and deliberate

reorienting away from remote cultural trend centers as predominant guides and toward

the immediate and directly experienced environment, (2) an increased sensitivity to the

constantly negotiated territory between physical and virtual experiences, (3) looking

closely at physical surroundings and evidence of social patterns compared to the

prevalent perceived stereotypes about the place, (4) recording and documenting

discoveries to cement conscious awareness of regional life and to share and discuss

them with like-minded regional designers in working toward regional community, and

(5) using this sensitivity toward local region in your design work and content

development process for clients.

Lippard quotes Michael Martone’s essay “The Flatness” regarding sensory

understanding of place and region:


The Midwest is too big to be seen [as the Heartland]…I think of it more as a web of

tissue, a membrane, a skin. And the way I feel about the Midwest is the way my skin

feels and the way I feel about my own skin…the Midwest is hide, an organ of sense

and not power, delicate and coarse at the same time…(Lippard, 1997, p. 34)

Design writers continue to claim that the problems future designers will face are

far more global, interconnected, and layered with complexity than those their teachers

and forebears face today. If so, then designers who are intimately knowledgeable about

local and regional life will be needed to translate and situate one-size-fits-all design

solutions into community fabrics in a way that is both functional and palatable to local

residents. Ironically, corporations that have transcended global political boundaries to

optimize their competitive advantage but who have also seen that the goods and services

they offer are not equally received by consumers across all cultures and regions, will

now need to rely on exactly the kind of sensitivities that regionalist designers cultivate.

This need to think global but adapt and sell local will also continue to expand the

collaboration between designers and social scientists like ethnographers. But, there are

critical differences between those who study a local or regional culture and those who

live within that culture.


Figure 154: Itu Chaudhuri - India

To this, Lippard adds Kent Ryden’s explanation in Mapping the Invisible

Landscape of sensing place as “a specific genre of regional folklore” which describes:

…four layers of meaning familiar to local residents but invisible to visitors,

cartographers, and even scholars: local and material lore including local names for

flora, fauna, and topography; handed-down history, much of it intimate, some of it

apochryphal; group identity and place-based individual identity; and the emotions or

affective bonds attached to place… (Lippard, 1997, p. 34)

Sited content and authorship

When asking what it means to author “sited” content as a graphic designer, this

quote from Lippard bears repeating:


If art is defined as “universal,” and form is routinely favored over content, then

artists are encouraged to transcend their immediate locales. But if content is

considered the prime component of art, and lived experience is seen as a prime

material, then regionalism is not a limitation but an advantage, a welcome base that

need not exclude outside influences but sifts them through a local filter. Good

regional art has both roots and reach. (Lippard, 1997, p. 37)

Cultivating a knack for regionalist authorship and sited content is not more

complicated than developing a deep knowledge of the place in which you live and work—

its local ornamental traditions, public space aesthetic, local population demographics

and temperaments—but no less complicated than this, because there are no shortcuts

without lapsing into Berry’s “regionalisms of condescension” that act like “exploitive

industries.” In discussing how to create regional design, it is easier to discuss it in terms

of “world” graphic design (meaning anything that doesn’t come directly out of the

European modernist tradition, or a reaction to it) due to modernism’s pervasive reach.

Geoffrey Caban’s World Graphic Design: Contemporary Graphics from Africa, the Far

East, Latin America, and the Middle East attempts to catalog the richness of graphic

voices that are rooted in non-Western cultures and finds the same problem:

It is difficult to find examples of visual communication that have not been touched in

some way by new technologies and international design approaches. Many of the

designers whose work is represented in this book felt it necessary, for various

reasons, to undertake their design education abroad. Some completed their studies

at leading design schools in the USA, Europe, and the UK before returning to practice

in their own countries. Having honed their skills and acquired a grasp of international

approaches and technologies, they were often disappointed to find on their return

that many of the visual traditions of their homeland were being lost. (Caban, 2004,

p. 8)


Figure 155: Saki Mafundikwa - Zimbabwe

Still, after many interviews with graphic designers around the world, much like

what the PRINT Regional Design Annual attempts to do in America, Caban has distilled

some general insights into regional influences on the world designers whose work he

features:

Designers from Iran speak of the thousands of years of visual traditions that have

shaped contemporary approaches to design in their country, and give as examples

the calligraphy and textile patterns of pre-Islamic civilizations, as well as miniature

painting, ceramic tiles and Persian carpets. In China Fang Chen’s design for a pack of

modern playing cards was inspired by the Figure Cards of Heroes of the Water

Margin Chronicles by the seventeenth-century Chinese painter Lao-lian Chen.

Taiwanese design Su Tsung-Hsiung has drawn upon the cursive style of Hsing Tsao,

a Taiwanese calligrapher from the Ching dynasty, while the posters of U.G. Sato of

Japan have been influenced greatly by the Ukiyo-e woodcut painting of the Edo

period.

Indigenous influences on designers from Latin America have come from pre-Hispanic

native ornament and handicrafts, African art, and more recent iconology such as the

gauchos and the mate of Argentina. According to Zimbabwean designer Saki


Mafundikwa, Picasso’s inspiration for Cubism sprang from the traditional masks of

Africa, and this was the beginning of modern graphic design. (Caban, 2004, p. 9)

Figure 156: Majid Abbasi - Iran

To illustrate Berry’s “exploitive industrial regionalism,” a typically cynical

corporate advertising example from Designing Across Cultures of how one can avoid

regionalist design principles and focus instead on “targeting” an “ethnic” audience for

purely commercial purposes should suffice:

Stay on Target

There are various levels of targeting ethnic groups. As a rule, the targeting gets

more effective—and more expensive—with each level.

1. Just adding subtitles to a general-market ad (no one recommends that).


2. Changing the language in typesetting or voice-overs (called “localization,” it’s

a little better.

3. Adding Pan-Asian or Pan-Hispanic models.

4. Also (or only, if there aren’t people in the design) changing other visual cues

to appeal to specific groups.

5. Designing a different ad for each ethnic subgroup you want to reach,

including a different model, altered message, relevant attitudes. It’s not just

recommended because ad agencies like huge budgets, but because

advertising is about building relevance. And although there are commonalities

to be drawn among ethnic groups (and all people, for that matter), in many

cases, the most relevant designs are those that can capture what’s unique

about the consumer. (Lipton, 2002, p. 11)

One can imagine a brand manager at P&G charged with “building brand

relevance” and “capturing unique consumer attributes” who has this list laminated and

taped behind the monitor in his cubicle. Why bother getting to know the folks in Asia for

whom you’re designing? Just use a “Pan-Asian” model! That’ll get ‘em to buy. And if

that’s not enough to get the ‘market shift’ needed, you can “change other visual cues.”

The sad thing about a list like this is that it’s a distillation of an entire mindset that has

been systematically rolled out across entire industries to pander to lowest common

denominators of Pavlovian audience response toward text and image rather than to

empathize, embolden, or ennoble. It is a poverty to graphic design’s true power. There is

a photo stylist somewhere who works with an art director who follows this list; that

stylist has a trunk full of “other visual cues” that are supposedly Pan-African, Pan-

Appalachian, or Pan-Hyde Park as the need arises. What are they? A black hand fan with

ebony inlay, a sofa painting with wild pack horses running across a hillside, and a gilded

floor-length rococo mirror, respectively?


Should all graphic design be regional? Of course not. The best balance of

regional and international focus in any given project usually lies more in the client’s and

audience’s needs than in the designer or content. There are certainly messages that

warrant and even demand an internationally neutral approach. The question becomes

one of specificity. Is it appropriate to use imagery, writing, and colors that are locally

sited in a graphic work meant for cross-cultural distribution where any ambiguity or

potential connotative misreadings can hinder the communication goals? This is where

the methods and the legacy of modernism are most at home: the realm of virtual brand

spaces owned and meticulously cultivated by multinational corporations.

Figure 157: Memed Erdener - Turkey

But there is an ironic twist to the question of specificity and its interplay with

style. When designing something that tries to be everything to everyone, it tends to wind


up being nothing to anyone—the more universal the approach, the more bland the

outcome. Often, things designed from a strongly individual perspective that might

appear at first to be inappropriately specific in tone of voice wind up having the broadest

appeal even if not the most flexible function. This is because things that tend toward the

personal and specific often wind up evoking a compelling self confidence that is

contagious and attractive, even to those who may be outside the narrow intended

audience—people can tell it’s something that knows what it is and why it exists; it has

identity, and it’s convincing. I would like to see more designers with modernist

predilections experiment with adopting more intensely personal responses to content

development and authorship if not form, color, and layout—even when it seems that

neutrality is required—if only to see if this ironic twist of personal authenticity can be

exploited.


Figure 158: Segun Olude - Nigeria

Figure 159: U.G. Sato - Japan

If we define legibility by the question, “Can you read me?” and readability by the

question, “Do you want to read me?” then modernism clearly prefers to honor legibility

while regionalism prefers to honor readability. The modernist approach relies most

heavily on abstraction as its primary design development method, and while this lends

it great power in crafting singular images that can cross cultural barriers easily and

systems templates that can hold myriad plug-and-play messages, abstraction also

hinders its ability to convey messages so finely tailored to a specific audience that it can

assimilate into a place completely under the radar and become sited. Modernist works

tend to remain, at their deepest existential cores, exiles and émigrés. It is the

quintessential illustration of these ideas to place Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water


(Figure 160) next to LeCorbusier’s Villa Savoye (Figure 161). There is a stony

permanence in the sitedness of Falling Water—the place in which it rests has become

equally sited in it—while the Villa Savoye could raze a forested site clean with its rockets

as it descends from space on nearly any patch of level ground in the world. One can

sense a ladder coming down from those famous ribbon windows and someone taking a

giant leap for mankind at any moment. The same holds true, though in different ways,

when comparing a poster designed by the contemporary designer Paula Scher (Figure

162) with a distinct regional flavor (New York street culture / Broadway) to a mid-

century modernist masterwork poster by graphic designer Josef Müller-Brockmann

(Figure 163).

Figure 160: Frank Lloyd Wright – Falling Water

Figure 161: LeCorbusier - Villa Savoye


Figure 162:Paula Scher - Bring In ‘Da Noise

Figure 163: Josef Müller-Brockmann – Beethoven poster

A related set of questions about regionalism.

1. Shouldn’t all good design respond to content and client needs coming from

a distinctive perspective?

2. Is it even necessary to distinguish regional practice as such?

3. Isn’t it just bleary-eyed nostalgia to want to be regional?

These are common and mostly pejorative reactions to the idea of regionalism

across all the arts, including the graphic arts. There is a similar debate in the design

world about sustainability as a professional priority and educational mandate. There are

some who say it should be taught as a ‘special topic’ and others say it should be

assimilated into design curricula simply as an expected component of all “good” design

henceforth. The answers here are subjective and dependent mostly on audience. It is my


assertion that (1) yes, all good design should convey distinct perspective, even that along

modernist lines, even though this simply isn’t the case when looking across the bulk of

contemporary practice, (2) yes, it is necessary to distinguish regional practice because

consciousness in this case creates the act!—not self-consciousness that is an ego-driven

quest for recognition and a strong presence in the reader’s experience, but rather a

conscious choice to shift awareness during the design process to regional perspectives

and away from universality, and (3) words like ‘nostalgia’ and ‘provincialism’ have

always been used to denigrate the concerns of those outside cultural style trend centers

like New York, even though the work happening in those centers is often quite

provincial and isolated in its own way, regardless of how close it is to the very sources

which it devours:

In fact, though, all art is regional, including that made in our “art capital,” New York

City. In itself extremely provincial, New York’s art world is rarely considered

“regional” because it directly receives and transmits international influences. The

difference between New York and “local” art scenes is that other places know what

New York is up to but New York remains divinely oblivious to what’s happening off

the market and reviewing map. Yet, paradoxically, when the most sophisticated

visitors from the coasts come to “the sticks,” they often prefer local folk art and

“naïve” artists to warmed-over syntheses of current big-time styles. (Lippard, 1997,

p. 36)

Quick litmus test for regionalism. Can a finished piece be used as a

template? If so, it’s probably not unique to any given perspective or region. Could you

simply open a digital file of an event poster or graphic—something that’s tied to a

specific place or time—change its title at the top, swap out a few photos, and reuse it for

another sited event elsewhere to equal effect? If so, it’s probably much closer to the

modernist language and rational mindset which claims that aspiring to universality is


the foundation of good communication. Site-specificity is a prerequisite of regional

design (in physical sitedness or spirit). It is anathema to most modernism, but

fundamentally, the two are not mutually exclusive.


Strategies for building regional design awareness

Figure 164: Colorist, cover

Colorist by Kobayashi. A sadly out-of-print book by Shigenobu Kobayashi

called “Colorist” (Kobayashi, 1998) provides a simple and clear methodology for

awakening to regional color and documenting it wherever one might live or travel. The

following pages from the book will give you a sense of the methodology which could be

adapted in any number of ways to make it practical for one’s own circumstance or

technological choices. The most useful aspect of the work is his simple color

arrangement matrix that can be used to categorize and place colors in context to each

other for at least pseudo-quantitative comparative analysis. Also helpful are the

checklist of skills to become a sensitive colorist, and methodology for researching

regional colors.


Figure 165: Colorist, color matrix


Figure 166: Colorist, color preference types


Figure 167: Colorist, checklist of color skills


Figure 168: Colorist, regional colors, deep


Figure 169: Colorist, building materials


Figure 170: Colorist, naturals


Figure 171: Colorist, greens


Figure 172: Colorist, blues


Figure 173: Colorist, white


Figure 174: Colorist, Black


Figure 175: Colorist, methodology for researching and recording local color


Figure 176: Colorist, city color surveys 1


Figure 177: Colorist, city color surveys 2


Figure 178: Colorist, city identity in color


Local / regional form and ornament. If form is the stuff of what we see in

graphic design, then it goes directly to what regional graphic design looks like to be

concerned with local and regional forms in making regional graphic design. I have often

referred in my teaching to the primary criteria of all good design across disciplines as

the “meaningful marriage of form and content.” It sounds simple but is a sometimes

elusive mixture to achieve. Nevertheless, if there is anything graphic designers love, it’s

what something looks like, and sensitivity to, research about, and the cataloging of local

and regional forms should be right up the alley of most designers with graphic training.

The question here is where to look for specifically regional forms upon which a

graphic designer can draw. Because forms have been largely standardized and

homogenized by the modernist movement over the years, one potential answer lies not

necessarily in form directly, but in ornament. Form (and specifically structural form)

and ornament have had a contentious relationship throughout architectural theory’s

history. Alternately celebrated and reviled, ornament has come to be viewed as an

integral part of many culture’s creative output, and indispensable, regardless of the

modernist tendency away from its use. Leopold Mozart was once quoted as saying, ‘even

the peasant song is softened with graces.’

Ornament has often been seen as something superadded to utility, that it is

essentially functionless and unnecessary, even criminal and indicative of a degenerate

culture (Adolph Loos). Others point to its oneiric function in enriching our dreams of

the places we inhabit. Farshid Moussavi argues, in fact, that ornament is quite necessary

and functional in his Function of Ornament:

Ornament is the figure that emerges from the material substrate, the expression of

embedded forces through processes of construction, assembly and growth. It is


through ornament that material transmits affects. Ornament is therefore necessary

and inseparable from the object. It is not a mask determined a priori to create

specific meanings (as in Postmodernism), even though it does contribute to

contingent or involuntary signification (a characteristic of all forms.) It has no

intention to decorate, and there is in it no hidden meaning. At the best of times,

ornament becomes and “empty sign” capable of generating an unlimited number of

resonances…Decoration is contingent and produces “communication” and

resemblance. Ornament is necessary and produces affects and resonance. (Moussavi

& Kubo, 2006, p.8)

One of the more compelling arguments for the use of ornament, beyond its

obvious cultural significance to many people, is that it is an antidote to the failed

aesthetic goals of the modern movement itself. The extreme construction demands and

tight tolerances for flush, clean, architectonic surfaces promoted by the International

Style eventually separated it from the very masses to which it was originally supposed to

provide liberation. What most modernist apologists have refused to admit it that it just

cost too much for normal people to afford. It feel into the same trap of most arts against

which it first raged in becoming yet another ‘style’ for the rich and elite. What ornament

offers instead, is forgiveness—surfaces that can be adorned are often able to cover

minor imperfections and take up slack in tolerances with grace and even relish, an effect

closer to decoupage than to precise metal sculpture.

James Trilling writes about our need to regain ‘the lost art of seeing’ ornament in

the Language of Ornament in order to appreciate its potential in our aesthetic

understanding of the places we inhabit:

Irrespective of medium, provenance, period, or style, ornament has the power to

give our surroundings a new dimension of pleasure, provided we know where and

how to look…Ornament is a way of creating, but it is also a way of seeing. Seeing

ornamentally is really four separate skills. We need to recognize ornament when we

see it, to recognize motifs and patterns, to understand the relation of ornament to


functional form, and to identify ornamental styles. The best way to learn these skills

is to study ornament as closely as possible, analyzing every detail, first in isolation,

then in relation to the whole. (Trilling, 2001, p. 22-23)

So the question remains, how to look for form and ornament in a region? Lippard

suggests we start very close to home and that which we already know intimately:

A starting point, for artists or for anyone else, might be simply learning to look

around where you live now. What Native peoples first inhabited this place? When

was your house built? What’s the history of the land use around it? How does it fit

into the history of the area? Who lived there before? What changes have been made

or have you made? If you’ve always lived there, what is different now from when you

were young? If you haven’t, what’s different from where you were raised and from

when you moved there? What is your house’s relation to others near it and the

people live in them? How does its interior relate to the exterior? Does the style and

decoration of either reflect your family’s cultural background, the places from which

your people came? If not, why not? Is there a garage? Is there a lawn? a garden?

Have you cut down trees or planted them? Is the vegetation local or imported? Is

there water to sustain it? Do any animals live there? Have they always been there?

Are there more or less of them? What do you see from your favorite window? What

does the view mean to you? How does it change with seasons and time? And so on

and on. (Lippard, 1997, p. 25)

Landscape and architecture. For the designer looking to reconnect to

regional place in order to tap into the richness of content and context it can offer, few

elements are better to study than the natural landscape and architecture. These things

operate on the longest time scale and are therefore often the best repository of formal

vocabulary which remains meaningful and relevant to a region. Graphic design and

fashion tend to work very closely together at the other end of the spectrum, with major

industry stylistic shifts sometimes occurring quite literally by the season.

Lippard promotes landscape as more than just a primary container of regional

identity, but also a way of seeing:


If landscape is a way of seeing, there are potentially as many landscapes as

individual ways of seeing, or at least as many as cultural ways of seeing—although

some people seem threatened by this degree of multiplicity. Otherness and

familiarity are reinforced by impressions of landscape. Backgrounds inevitably affect

foregrounds. Part of the yearning for a homeland left behind is a sense of space and

place that differs from the hybrid one that has come to be seen as generically

“American.” Given a choice, people often immigrate to geographies that remind them

of home. (Lippard, 1997, p. 61)

If we are obsessed with constantly modifying our built world, and it takes huge

resources to make widespread changes to our infrastructure, then nature always follows

behind and seams itself back into the gaps as the marks we make fade and time passes.

We cannot outpace nature, try as we might. Sensitivity to change on this time scale can

be wonderfully enriching to a designer or artist living in any given region, and it can

infuse creative work with great wisdom. But this requires a studied patience and

dedication to rootedness to collect—as Berry states, this kind of regionalism requires a

“particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live

in.”


Type in the digital age. Forget your hopes of finding that perfect “regional”

font to use in your burgeoning locally-aware practice, except of course for the drawers of

whatever metal type you have at your disposal at your community co-operative

letterpress shop! That’s authenticity by expedience. Everything digital is up for grabs at

this point. Certainly digital font designers have tried to create regionally inspired faces

(Émigré’s release of Christian Schwartz’ Los Feliz, H&FJ’s Gotham from NYC subway

signs, various blackletter adaptations). As Ricouer states:

Even if it is possible to ascribe to such or such a country or culture the invention of

writing, printing, the steam engine, etc. an invention rightfully belongs to mankind

as a whole. Sooner or later it creates an irreversible situation for everyone; its

spread may be delayed but not totally prevented. Thus we are confronted with a de

facto universality of mankind: as soon as an invention appears in some part of the

world we can be sure it will spread everywhere. (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 44)

As soon as digital fonts are released, they are co-opted for their newness,

regardless of cultural origin, by an editorial magazine designer across the globe from the

designer who is under pressure to constantly find something people haven’t seen. Of

course, one should respect obvious situations, for example: setting a translation of a

masterwork of 19th century French literature, which should probably not be set in the

uber-German Walbaum. But beyond strongly geographically rooted content, use

(nearly) whatever you like. To illustrate the cultural relativity of contemporary type

design, try to guess the country of origin of the new 2012 fonts in the following table

(Figure 179). The answers follow in the next figure (Figure 180).


Figure 179: National type quiz: guess the country of origin for these 2012 fonts


JAPAN “Quintet”

Designer:

Kunihiko Okano

NETHERLANDS “Bery”

Designer:

Fred Smeijers

U.S.A. “Harriet”

Designer:

Jackson Cavanaugh

ARGENTINA “Alegreya”

Designer:

Juan Pablo del Peral

FRANCE “Macula”

Designer:

Jacques Le Bailly

FRANCE “Eskapade”

Designer:

Alisa Nowak Figure 180: Answers to national type quiz

Local materials and sustainability. Developing a sensitivity to place must

certainly lead to a changing relationship with your community neighbors and to its

natural resources as well. Berry instructs us that:

If the land is made fit for human habitation by memory and "old association," it is

also true that by memory and association men are made fit to inhabit the

land…Without a complex knowledge of one's place, and without the faithfulness to

one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be

used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness,

moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only

insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

And so I look upon the sort of regionalism that I am talking about not just as a

recurrent literary phenomenon, but as a necessity of civilization and of survival.

(Berry, 2007, p. 40)

Sustainability has almost become an empty catch word at this point (many design

students today are “LEED-accredited professionals” before they are even professionals!)

Design pundits are expecting that it will fall away as a ‘special topic’ within educational


and professional circles, and simply become an expected parameter of all ‘good’ design

in the future, and perhaps this is best. But the kind of ethical practice to what Berry

alludes goes deeper than graphic design, but into ways of life that must be shared and

supported by more than one alone—it must be a conscious community endeavor to work

and to keep working.

Developing regional relationships as a designer can be about more than just

learning your sitedness: it is an essential part of ‘networking’ in the business sense, too,

and this can be fruitful from a sustainability standpoint. People who know each other

and understand common missions tend to share seemingly worthless resources that

might otherwise go to waste. A great example is getting to know your local print shops

and what kind of work they do. A great way to find cheap or even free materials, as well

as some creative challenges to your resourcefulness, would be using and reusing printer

overruns and scraps, industrial supply waste, and unique regional bioproducts.

Physical and virtual sitedness. The enormous interactive online potential of

event planning as connected to ideas of universal access, modernism, and regionalism

explored here is an exciting area for further inquiry. I cannot stress enough how this

area of design research and innovation has the potential to revolutionize an

understanding of what it means to be “sited” in an event’s physical location, but also

connect and interact with distant virtual participants in a way that is still authentic to

place and context-aware. It is far beyond the scope of this present thesis to flesh out

potential avenues, but two quick illustrations may lead to further exploration by others

in the future:

1. Physically and temporally sited events are inherently inconvenient and

exclusive since they require attendees to put aside other scheduled


engagements and pay the money to travel. Inevitably, all those who might

wish to attend cannot, and given the technology we have now, there is no

reason that substitutes can’t be provided. An event like IVC could easily

have gone further and sold web-based subscriptions to the conference so

virtual attendees could stream live audio and video from anywhere on the

globe and access it either live or on-demand for a period of time after the

event. This, of course, requires a good deal of technological capability on

the part of the event planners and their facilities, although these

limitations are quickly becoming less burdensome. “Livecasting” video and

audio solutions that are portable and inexpensive are on the way to the

market and will transform event planning as such in the future.

2. Perhaps more germane to the current discussion of regionalism is the

possibility inherent in “sitecasting” interactive events. An argument could

be made that promoting the advance of web interactivity through events

like the IVC might lead similar future events to cancel live attendance

altogether and simply exist only on the web. But, using local-area

networking (LAN) strategies, distributed digital networks can be created

using broadcasting equipment that remains site-specific and can only be

viewed when physically located close enough to the area to pick up the

LAN signal. Anyone who has a wireless network connected to their home

computer system to enable the networked use of mobile devices like cell

phones and digital tablets already understands the sitecasting concept.

Once you’re out of range of the signal, you’re out of luck…you have to find

another “hotspot.” This raises an enormous amount of interesting


theoretical potential for event interactivity that is physically sited, specific

to the cultural and regional influences of real places, but yet also rich with

layered virtual interactive potential among participants. Certain feeds

could be blocked to those who have not paid for access to those resources.

Different access rights levels could allow for mobile event staff to provide

tailored and context-specific support to an event in real time based on

current GPS locations of attendees, and yet be invisible to other networked

users in the physical area, while everyone involved are experiencing the

same physical environment (albeit, overlaid with different layers of

attendant digital information).

Spatial Sync Chart. In 2006, I produced a graphic exploration (Figure 181) of

the relationship between physical and virtual experiences as part of a graduate seminar

assignment that yielded interesting and relevant results to this regionalism discussion. I

simply tracked my activities for a full day in detailed journal entries, and then analyzed

those activities as an information design exercise along two axes: the physical and

synchronous. Because these are the two primary characteristics of any event that have a

direct impact on their sited character, it could prove to be a useful approach to event

planning and place awareness among designers. The idea was to subjectively rate each

activity in which I participated as to (1) the physical versus virtual space in which it was

performed and (2) the synchronous or asynchronous nature of its interactivity with

others. I then plotted these data points on a graph (Figure 182), entered their scaled

ratings into tables, and analyzed the statistical results to create profiles of the

synchronicity and physicality of my activities in “sparkline” graphics (Figure 183).


What might come of such an exercise? I can envision example applications where

the analysis results may help people understand (1) how they spend their time, (2) how

it is skewed toward either virtual spaces or asynchronous scheduling among family

members or coworkers, (3) how little they interact with the physical places in which they

live, and (4) how little they directly physically and temporally interact with the people in

their lives. All of these could speak directly to the inevitable need to reexamine the roles

of virtual and social technologies in our lives and their impact on our sensitivity to place.


Figure 181: Spatial Sync Chart, overall view


Figure 182: Spatial sync graph view


Figure 183: Spatial sync sparklines

Shifting priorities of the regionalist graphic designer

I read an interesting article many years ago in a journal for professional

musicians that discussed performance temperament and overcoming stage fright. The

name of the article and the journal escapes me now, but the part I remember clearly was

a discussion of the differences between live musical experience and that of listening to


recorded music. The article presented a list of performance priorities for musicians who

play live versus the priorities of those who work in studios producing recordings. The

interesting thing about the list was that the priorities were the same, only in reverse. At

the top of the list of priorities for the live musician was “connecting emotionally with the

audience,” while this was the lowest priority for the studio recording musician. The top

priority listed for recording session artists was “interpretive vision” and “error-free

performance” since recordings tend to become standard references for those musicians

researching a work later.

Much in the same vein, I present here a subjective and highly contestable list of

priorities (Figure 184) for the regionalist designer as opposed to the modernist in the

hopes that it will provoke personal responses and help practitioners to reassess and

experiment with their mindset leading up to a regionalist design effort.

Modernism's Priorities Regionalism's Priorities

Conceptual clarity Authentic and embodied voice and perspective

Neutral interpretation and rendering of content Audience analysis

Defined formal composition principles Emotional connection to audience

Cross-cultural legibility Sitedness of content, color, and form

Mass-production and multimedia optimization Overt appeals to value systems

Audience analysis Conceptual clarity

Emotional connection to audience Cross-cultural legibility

Authentic and embodied voice and perspective Defined formal composition principles

Overt appeals to value systems Neutral interpretation and rendering of content

Sitedness of content, color, and form Mass-production and multimedia optimization

Figure 184: The shifting priorities of regionalist versus modernist design

What does “regional” graphic design look like?

Since it is usually the last word among graphic artists about how theories like this

“regionalism” actually apply to them, and because those who may not have the patience

for regionalist practice have probably turned to this back page to find out how to use or


at least mimic it, I’ll finish by addressing the elephant in the room semi-directly. I’m

frankly so sick of graphic designers’ preoccupation with what things look like that I’m

inclined to offer an answer to this all-important question in verse:

Regional graphic design looks like

what you fail to remember smelling

at the café where you first saw it


the poster idea you loved so much

before school beat it out of you


every cultural cliché peddler’s

mailbox and sock drawer


the home that modernism made

by the woods for retirement


what multinational corporations

can’t take away from you


what you and your Man Friday drew

in the sand and it saved your life


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Appendix: Literature reference

Literature Overview

I am including the major writers who have influenced the ideas in this thesis

investigation together here so as to provide a condensed reference of the most germane

passages which I have excerpted from their works. Even a reader new to the ideas of

regionalism will be able to read these passages straight through and gain exposure to the

concepts in relatively linear fashion. I also decided to collect excerpts here by author in

chronological order of their original writing so that readers could refer back from any

section of the thesis and reread that writer’s complete excerpts. I find this helps to gain a

sense of each writer’s fuller message and place along a spectrum than trying to piece it

together gradually from disparate quotes embedded in a narrative.

The 2007 publication of Vincent Canizaro’s Architectural Regionalism: Collected

Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition is a watershed moment in

architectural (and design) education about regionalism. Long overdue, it is a single

volume that collects most of the major touchstone writings that influenced the shaping

of regionalist theories in architecture over the past century. There are many academic

edited volumes aimed at the education and scholarly market, but this one was very

useful to my research in two ways: (1) Canizaro wrote a wonderful introduction that

succinctly draws the strands of thought from various and philosophically disparate

writers on regionalism together into a coherent thread which is easy to follow, eminently

teachable, and a worthy contribution to the theory in its own right, and (2) he decided to

include the works selected in their entirety without editing and also provided the

original bibliography information of all the works featured. When these authors are

referenced in the body of the thesis, it is very helpful if the reader has consulted the full


excerpts included here to gain a better understanding of the text within the larger

cultural debate about regionalism.

Vincent Canizaro

Canizaro is currently on architecture faculty at the University of Texas in San

Antonio. He holds baccalaureate and doctoral degrees in architecture from Texas A&M

and a master’s from UC Berkeley. He has long been a champion of regionalist causes

and teaches courses at UTSA in sustainability and environmental architectural design.

He also has industry experience as a practitioner and is active in his local AIA chapter,

practicing what he preaches in regards to regionalism. His excerpts are provided first

since they summarize the collected essays in his excellent 2007 edited volume,

“Architectural Regionalism” (even though they were published most recently and the

rest of the excerpts here are presented in chronological order of publication.)

Three epigrams (Canizaro, 2007, p. 17):

Regionalism is not a fixed concept. No region, whether natural or cultural, is stable.

—Felix Frankfurter

as quoted in Merrill Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America (Madison: Univ. of

Wisconsin Press, 1965), xvi.

In other words, the nature of a “region” varies with the needs, purposes, and

standards of those using the concept.

—Merrill Johnson (ibid)

Regionalism suggests a cure for many current ills. Focused in the region, sharpened

for the more definite enhancement of life, every activity, cultural or practical, menial

or liberal, becomes necessary and significant; divorced from this context, and

dedicated to archaic or abstract schemes of salvation and happiness, even the finest


activities seem futile and meaningless; they are lost and swallowed in a vast

indefiniteness.

—Lewis Mumford

(“The Theory and Practice of Regionalism,” Sociological Review 20 (April

1928): 140.

As a theory about connectedness to place it [regionalism] is situated among other

theories of place such as contextualism, site-specificity in art and design, landscape

urbanism, and planning. It is allied with other disciplines concerned with spatial

phenomena such as cultural geography, cartography, folklore, and historical studies,

but it differs from these in scale and application. At the scale of a region, issues and

concerns emerge that are not available at the immediate site or context. (Canizaro,

2007, p. 17)

A region is, first, a large area with boundaries determined by a range of cultural and

natural criteria. At the extreme cultural end, visible in the etymology of the term,

political control or the establishment of jurisdictions is the criterion. At the opposite

end, region is determined by naturally occurring physical features. (Canizaro, 2007,

p.18)

Regionalism is a habit of thought or a prejudice in favor of persons and practices

found in one’s general vicinity. Its meaning is similar to that of provincialism,

although regionalism lacks this word’s connotation of small-mindedness and lack of

sophistication.

—Jonathan Smith (Canizaro, 2007, p.20)

Regionalism is variously a concept, strategy, tool, technique, attitude, ideology, or

habit of thought. Despite its many manifestations, collectively it is a theory that

supports resistance to various forms of hegemonic, universal, or otherwise

standardizing structures that would diminish local differentiation. These theories

propose alternatives in the form of methods and criteria for the respect,


revitalization, and, if necessary, reconstruction of life along regionally determined

lines. It is a self-conscious set of theories, which distinguishes it from the

vernacular—the response to local conditions by necessity, not by choice. The

vernacular is often characterized dubiously as “unconscious,” which is meant to

suggest that it is not purposely regional, but only accidental; in fact, settlers and

other pioneers very scrupulously and consciously adapted the architecture they knew

to the places they chose to settle. Regionalism is voluntary; alongside being self-

conscious, it is a choice made by a practitioner (planner, architect, or politician)

among alternatives, including competing theories of regionalism. (Canizaro, 2007,

p.20)

In cultural affairs, provincialism has a predominantly negative association, shared by

regionalism in some critiques, referring to work that is limited or unsophisticated.

Provincial works, Treib asserts [Marc Treib], are distinct from regional ones in that

provincial works are limited by their distance from a cultural center, such as New

York or Los Angeles, in which the standards for excellence are set. Regionalism is the

opposite, in that it resists the values of the centers of standardization and taste,

actively promoting the local—“the regional is fertilized by its locale.” (Canizaro,

2007, p. 21)

It [regionalism] is an architectural theory, informed by particularist values, that

borders on ideology. These values range from the desire to preserve a region’s

cultural heritage to the desire to manifest a new social and political order drawn

along regional distinctions. The latter aims to facilitate a restructured and more

vibrant social life; the former, an ideology of resistance to both the homogenization

of building culture and/of centralized, absolutist controls…consistent themes are

resistance to standard forms (preferring a balance between universal and local), a

concern for authenticity (the key to cultural and personal identity), and the fostering

of connectedness among people of the specific culture, history, identity, and ecology

of their region. (Canizaro, 2007, p. 21)

Regionalist resistance can be political and representational, concerned with the

maintenance of personal or local identity through form…Modern resistance continues


this tradition, but instead of a pope or king, the dominant force has become the

changing structure of society and the built environment under disinterested central

organizations, industrialization, modern technology, and globalization. Each has

enabled the erosion of valued practices and places against which engagement—

relating to one’s place through participatory design—or designs that foster local

material and social connections serve as the resistant means. (Canizaro, 2007, p.

22)

For our purposes, modernity is a mode of social life in which the establishment of the

“new” is a driving force. “Being modern” often requires the attenuation of tradition

and continuity to attain the fruits of progress and innovation. But jettisoning these

cultural structures has negative consequences. The modern world is rife with what

Giddens [sociologist Anthony Giddens] calls “disembedding mechanisms” that, while

aimed at achieving a better quality of life, also lift social relations from their local

contexts through ease of travel, communications, and trade. (Canizaro, 2007, p. 23)

Regionalist practice strives to establish connectedness between people and

place…But, in “accepting the universal order of the machine,” said Lewis Mumford,

we still “have the duty to make it human and see that it incorporates more, not less,

of those social and esthetic elements that bind people sentimentally to their homes

and their regions.” [The South in Architecture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

119.] As professionals [designers] we must seek to balance the universal with the

regional and be aware of our unique culpability in creating a gap between our clients

and their places. At a minimum this realization should serve as a note of caution

about whose view of the region should be dominant, if any. (Canizaro, 2007, p. 25-

26)

I [Vincent Canizaro] contend that authenticity is a quality of engagement between

people and things or people and places. It is not a property inherent to things or

places but a measure of our connection to them. Architectural theorist Kim Dovey

suggests that the authentic object or environment must be “of undisputed origin,” its

form should be connected to its process of creation; it must be genuine, things are

what they appear to be or what one expects them to be; and it must be reliable, it


should continue to function over time. [“The Quest for Authenticity and the

Replication of Environmental Meaning,” in David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer,

eds., Dwelling, Place & Environment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 3-

49.] Satisfaction of these three conditions results in what Dovey refers to as

“experiential depth,” which is connectedness without deception—when one’s

knowledge of a thing or place is backed up by its reality. (Canizaro, 2007, p. 26-27)

Edward Relph [Canadian geographer, author of Place and Placelessness, 1977]

similarly sees authenticity as a particular order of relation between people, things,

and places—an order measured in degrees of participation. The more we are able to

participate, the more authentic the connection or relation. Lack of participation leads

to a lack of direct experience, which results in detachment…

Dean MacCannell’s analysis of tourist experiences demonstrates another facet of

authenticity. Seeking “authentic experiences,” tourists participate in a structure of

“fronts” and “backs.” The front is the public face of a place, and the back is the space

of both privacy and functionality—where “things really happen.” “Behind-the-scenes”

adventures are sought after because they promise to show the traveler life as it is

lived by locals. Authenticity is determined by the degree of access…Some referential

regionalist architects present fronts as backs or use the imagery or motifs of

authentically regional buildings on modern buildings so they will appear more

regional. Like tourist destinations, which stage “authentic” experiences, they trade

on the desire for authenticity to engender a false sense of belonging. [Many modern

designers] argue for a wider consideration of the “back” in architecture, one that

expands its role beyond the internal discourse of architects and theorists; one

interwoven with the local history, meaning, and expression of a region—with its

cultural landscape; one that provides for participation, experiential depth, and

connectedness to life and how it is lived in that place or region. (Canizaro, 2007, p.

27)

Critical regionalism is an approach to architectural production aimed at resisting a

number of physical, cultural, and social changes thought to limit the quality of

modern life and architecture. It is a theory and practice of resistance that seeks to

establish a dialectic between an increasingly globalized civilization and the local

traditions found in regions, without resorting to romanticism or nostalgia. Aimed to


resist the homogenization of the physical and social environment, it is for the

production of experientially diverse environments. It is against the casual and

irresponsible use of cultural symbols, and for thoughtful consideration. It is against

the use of standardized construction methods and materials, and for local materials

and building traditions. It is against the sense of relativism in modern culture, and

for situated, but not dogmatic, knowledge and experience. The leveling forces of

commercialization, by which everything can be devalued to a “price point” are

processes its methods seek to ameliorate. (Canizaro, 2007, p. 32)

Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was one of the 20th century’s most influential

philosophers. His writings from the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Chicago

addressed the various effects of modernization upon cultures due to changes in

technology, free-market capitalism, and industrialization. His thought built upon the

earlier traditions of phenomenology by Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer and

combined them with hermeneutical methods and a humanist outlook on the

interpretation of culture’s systems and symbols.

From “Universal Civilization and National Cultures,” originally from: History

and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 271-84.

The problem is this: mankind as a whole is on the brink of a single world civilization

representing at once a gigantic progress for everyone and an overwhelming task of

survival and adapting our cultural heritage to this new setting. To some extent, and

in varying ways, everyone experiences the tension between the necessity for the free

access to progress and, on the other hand, the exigency of safeguarding our

heritage.

…

How can we characterize this universal world civilization? Some have hastily

characterized it as a technical civilization. Yet technics is not the decisive and

fundamental factor; for the source of the spread of technics is the scientific spirit


itself. Primarily, this is what unifies mankind at a very abstract and purely rational

level, and which, on that basis, endows civilization with its universal character.

(Ricoeur, 2007, p. 43)

These tools [technics], which belong to the primitive resources of mankind, have in

themselves a very great inertia. Left to themselves they tend to coagulate in solid

traditions. They are not transformed by something intrinsic to them, but by the

repercussions of scientific knowledge; tools are revolutionized and become machines

by means of thought.

…

Even if it is possible to ascribe to such or such a country or culture the invention of

writing, printing, the steam engine, etc. an invention rightfully belongs to mankind

as a whole. Sooner or later it creates an irreversible situation for everyone; its

spread may be delayed but not totally prevented. Thus we are confronted with a de

facto universality of mankind: as soon as an invention appears in some part of the

world we can be sure it will spread everywhere. Technical revolutions mount up and

because they do, they escape cultural isolation. We can say that in spite of delays in

certain parts of the world there is a single, world-wide technics. That is why national

or nationalistic revolutions, in making a nation approach modernization, at the same

time make it approach a certain cosmopolitanism. Even if—and we shall come back

to this presently—the scope is national or nationalistic it is still a factor of

communication to the extent that it is a factor of industrialization, for this makes it

share in the universal technical civilization. (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 44)

Lastly, it can be said that throughout the world an equally universal way of living

unfolds. This way of living is manifested by the unavoidable standardization of

housing and clothing. These phenomena derive from the fact that ways of living are

themselves rationalized by techniques which concern not only production but also

transportation, human relationships, comfort, leisure, and news programming as

well. Let us also mention the various techniques of elementary culture of

consumption of world-wide dimensions, displaying a way of living which has a

universal character. (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 45)


We have the feeling that this single world civilization at the same time exerts a sort

of attrition or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have

made the great civilizations of the past…Everywhere throughout the world, one finds

the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum

atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc. It seems as if

mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en

masse at a subcultural level.

…

It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modem civilization.

There is the paradox: how to become modem and to return to sources; how to

revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization. (Ricoeur,

2007, p. 47)

It is not easy to remain yourself and to practice tolerance toward other civilizations.

However much we may be inclined toward foreign cultures…the discovery of the

plurality of cultures is never a harmless experience…When we discover that there are

several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we

acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are

threatened with destruction by our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that

there are just others, that we ourselves are an "other" among others. All meaning

and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through

civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins…At this extreme point, the triumph of

the consumer culture, universally identical and wholly anonymous, would represent

the lowest degree of creative culture. It would be skepticism on a world-wide scale,

absolute nihilism in the triumph of comfort. (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 48)

What happens to my values when I understand those of other nations?

Understanding is a dangerous venture in which all cultural heritages risk being

swallowed up in a vague syncretism. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we have

given here the elements of a frail and provisional reply: only a living culture, at once

faithful to its origins and ready for creativity on the levels of art, literature,

philosophy, and spirituality, is capable of sustaining the encounter of other cultures-


not merely capable of sustaining but also of giving meaning to that encounter…In

order to confront a self other than one's own self, one must first have a self.

…

At bottom, syncretisms are always residual phenomena; they do not involve

anything creative; they are mere historical formations. Syncretisms must be opposed

by communication, that is, a dramatic relation in which I affirm myself in my origins

and give myself to another's imagination in accordance with his different civilization.

Human truth lies only in this process in which civilizations confront each other more

and more with what is most living and creative in them. Man's history will

progressively become a vast explanation in which each civilization will work out its

perception of the world by confronting all others…No one can say what will become

of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations by means other than

the shock of conquest and domination. (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 52)

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is an interesting blend of pragmatist and theorist—he is a writer

and practicing farmer in rural Kentucky, and has published more than thirty books of

poetry, fiction, and essays. His writings have been a clarion call to return to lives

connected to place and community. He makes eloquent agrarian arguments for the

preservation of the environment and for ethical citizenship.

From “The Regional Motive”, originally published in : A Continuous Harmony;

Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 63-70.

There is, for instance, a "regionalism" based upon pride, which behaves like

nationalism. And there is a "regionalism" based upon condescension, which

specializes in the quaint and the eccentric and the picturesque, and which behaves in

general like an exploitive industry [especially tourism]. These varieties, and their

kindred, have in common a dependence on false mythology that tends to generalize


and stereotype the life of a region. That is to say it tends to impose false literary or

cultural generalizations upon false geographical generalizations. (Berry, 2007, p. 37)

The regional motive is false when the myths and abstractions of a place are valued

apart from the place itself; that is regionalism as nationalism. It is also false when

the region is made the standard of its own experience-when, that is, perspective is

narrowed by condescension or pride so that a man is unable to bring to bear on the

life of his place as much as he is able to know. That is exploitive regionalism. (Berry,

2007, p. 38)

The regionalism that I adhere to could be defined simply as local life aware of

itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a

particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to

live in. It pertains to living as much as to writing, and it pertains to living

before it pertains to writing. The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that

local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for its continuance, upon

local knowledge. [my emphasis] (Berry, 2007, p. 39)

…in a letter to H. Rider Haggard about the effects of the migration of the English

working people, [the writer Thomas] Hardy wrote that, "there being no continuity of

environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories,

and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the

next."

From the perspective of the environmental crisis of our own time, I think we have to

add to Hardy's remarks a further realization: if the land is made fit for human

habitation by memory and "old association," it is also true that by memory and

association men are made fit to inhabit the land.

…

Without a complex knowledge of one's place, and without the faithfulness to one's

place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used

carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness,

moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only


insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

And so I look upon the sort of regionalism that I am talking about not just as a

recurrent literary phenomenon, but as a necessity of civilization and of survival.

(Berry, 2007, p. 40)

Michael Benedikt

Benedikt is a dedicated urbanist, holding a distinguished professor chair at the

University of Texas at Austin. His books carry on a long line of thought valuing real

phenomenological connections to the experience of place that runs through Heidegger

and Christian Norberg-Schulz. His most recent works, some unpublished or self-

published on his own website at http://www.mbenedikt.com, address the concept of

value in economic and environmental design systems.

There are valued times in almost everyone’s existence when the world is perceived

afresh: perhaps after a rain as the sun glistens on the streets and windows catch a

departing cloud, or, alone, when one sees again the roundness of an apple. At these

times our perceptions are not at all sentimental. They are, rather, matter of fact,

neutral and undesiring—yet suffused with an unreasoned joy at the simple

correspondence of appearance and reality, at the evident rightness of things as they

are. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 2)

Such experiences, such privileged moments, can be profoundly moving; and

precisely from such moments, I believe, we build our best and necessary sense of an

independent yet meaningful reality. I should like to call them direct aesthetic

experiences of the real and to suggest the following: in our media-saturated times it

falls to architecture to have the direct aesthetic experience of the real at the center

of its concerns. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 3)


We seem to fear that unless we keep talking and calling upon the world to talk, we

will be overcome by the dread muteness of objects and by the heedlessness of

nature, that we might awaken to our “true” condition as “strangers in a strange

land.”…we need not fear. On to any moment of perception—instantly, inevitably and

without bidding—the perspective of an entire cultural and biological heritage is

brought to bear. Our uprightness is in every tree, rocks divide themselves into the

throwable and the not, the future is always ahead.

Even, or especially, when the world is seen most sensitively, vividly and

dispassionately, our humanness is already soaked into it. Just as whipping around to

see your back in a mirror is futile, so no objective—that is, non-human—viewpoint,

no matter how brief, can be taken with respect to reality. You cannot catch the world

unaware and naked of meaning. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 10)

Realness, I think, can be divided into four components, the last one of which has two

aspects:

(a) presence

(b) significance

(c) materiality

(d) emptiness (Benedikt, 1987, p. 32)

Presence may be understood in the trivial sense. After all, if you can see it and touch

it, it has presence in as much as it exists to the senses…Implied is a certain tautness,

attentiveness, assertiveness.

A building with presence, for example, is not apologetic, but asserts itself as

architecture, having a right to be here…[it] is not one that would wish to disappear

(as do underground, camouflage/contextual, and some mirror-glass buildings); nor is

it coy, silly, garbled, embarrassed, referential, nervous, joking, or illusory—all

attempts at getting away from being here now. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 34)

If presence is largely a perceptual matter, significance is a cognitive

one…Significance is not achieved by the display of icons, signs and symbols—no

matter how “appropriate”—but by how buildings actually come to be and how they

continue to be part of the lives of the people who dream them, draw them, build


them, own them, and use them…Symbols and icons function in the context of ritual;

significant objects and places need not be so framed. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 38)

Iconic scenography as a mode of architectural design rests on cynicism about the

very possibility of authenticity. When inauthenticity is seen as harmless and/or as

the inevitable outcome of applying creative energy to a design problem, then

cynicism becomes a necessary professional posture never quite cloaked by any

amount of wit and winsomeness…

Buildings with significance show a fundamental seriousness—even when they are

“follies”—and a sense of magnitude independent of their actual size…Effort, care,

ingenuity (rather than cleverness), knowledge, ambition—these traits of its creators

“come through” in a building and tell us how it is to be taken. (Benedikt, 1987, p.

40)

One can see how buildings constructed rapidly by indifferent men with indifferent

plans, using remotely made and general parts, are bound to create indifference—at

best—in the population at large, let alone in those actually involved. These buildings

lack significance to anyone, and are the less real for it. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 42)

Materiality is probably the least problematic of the four components. It reflects our

intuition that for something to be real it ought to be made of “stuff,” material having

a palpability, a temperature, a weight and inertia, an inherent strength…

Veneers are fake if and when they suggest solidity and consistency of material

throughout the piece…Most plastic veneers are doubly fake: they disguise not only

the lack of correspondence between surface and interior, but also the nature of the

material in the first place, like a decoy.

The ubiquity of gypsum wallboard (“drywall”) construction derives, of course, from

the speed, economy, and formal freedom with which walls and ceilings of eye-fooling

substantiality can be made. Essential to its success, however, is drywall’s visual

similarity to plastered masonry (still, somehow, the “real thing” even after all these

years) and the face that we cannot tirelessly remain aware of the difference.

(Benedikt, 1987, p. 44)


The forces of economics, [and] the age-old desire of clients to have more precious

materials and effects than they can afford…make an insistence on authenticity in

materials somewhat quixotic. There are three ways “out”:

The first is to follow the 1915 advice of Geoffrey Scott, who seemed to recognize the

impending renewal of the problem’s importance. He simply advised moderation and

common sense [use just enough of good materials to do them justice, but not every

bit the visual affect might imply was needed]…

The [second] is to use materials, no matter how allusive, as allusive, and to seize

upon the genuinely unique properties of the material: to show the thickness of the

veneer, the hollowness of gypsum-board walls, the marvel of formica marble, the

freedom and power of paint. This addresses the issue of authenticity by framing, by

making fakery honest, as it were. (One must be wary, however, of covertly believing

the lie while overtly admitting deceit.)

The [third] strategy consists in (a) eschewing materials that do not behave like what

they are, (b) using materials that have keen tactile, visual, and kinesthetic

qualities—shiny or veined or sawn, (c) structurally stressing materials so that, in

feeling “their pain,” we are drawn to consider their substance, and (d) not using

materials that look or feel like nothing in particular (whose material is immaterial, as

it were). The last point is important. For indeterminacy of materials detracts from

realness as much as fakery. The term “ticky-tacky” expresses well not only our

disdain for the (supposed) cheapness of a material, but our defeat at identifying it.

(Benedikt, 1987, p. 46-48)

What is meant by emptiness here is rather more like…silence, clarity, and

transparency. Emptiness may resound without sound, may be filled by its potential

to be filled, and make open what is complete…Very much an intuition, it can be

analyzed only up to a point, and suggestiveness in the language is more necessary

than ever. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 50)

Nature is patient, ever-productive, and disinterested in the results the way no man

or woman can be. This lends to natural objects the paradoxical qualities of both

arbitrariness and inevitability…the flower does not bloom so that we can enjoy its

fragrance, nor does it rain in order to slake the thirst of animals. As the Zen haiku


has it:

departing geese do

not intend their reflection

in the lake below.

(Benedikt, 1987, p. 52)

Emptiness, component of realness that it is, is more like life as we find it, and points

us towards the beauty in life’s openness and beckoning: in window gleam, in dust

motes on an oak table. Architecture with emptiness is thus always unfinished: if not

literally, then by the space it makes and the potential it shows. We become engaged

with the intervals and open ends. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 58)

[on Modernism:] Having strayed from a long and venerable course, the efforts of the

Moderns to be of or ahead of their time—to re-think architecture, its ends and

means—have come to be seen as the very cause of their demise, and it is small

wonder that eclecticism and historicism and “mythicism” now tempt us…

While it may be argued that ironic poses and movie-set history, allegories and

recondite allusions, reflect most accurately and properly our information and

entertainment oriented culture, they can also be seen as a defeat: a sliding of

architecture into the world of television. For it can be argued equally well than an

architecture that stands against, or in contrast to, the culture-wide trend to

ephemeralization and relativism—as a kind of last bastion of dumb reality and foil to

it all—constitutes the more appropriate, timely, and potentially more esthetic

response. This, of course, if my position, and my plea. (Benedikt, 1987, p. 64)

Kenneth Frampton

Frampton (b. 1930) is a British architect and writer who has been a passionate

advocate for what he calls “critical regionalism” for over thirty years (a reconsidered

regionalism that transcends supposedly ‘unconscious’ or provincial design while still

connecting place to its cultural legacy.) His publication of “Towards a Critical


Regionalism” in The Anti-Aesthetic by Hal Foster in 1983 caused a sensation in

architectural theory circles, with spin-off debates among writers that continue to this

day. He has revised his ideas often, and the excerpts here are from a later revision of his

‘six points for an architecture of resistance,’ expanded to ten points.

From “Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic,”

originally from: Center 3: New Regionalism (1987): 20-27. The Center for American

Architecture and Design, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin.

…the reduction of building to the maximizing of economic criteria and to the adoption

of normative plans and construction methods reducing architecture to the provision

of an aesthetic skin—the packaging, in fact, of nothing more than a large commodity

in order to facilitate its marketing. This means that the scope of activity available to

the potential "regionalist" is interstitial rather than global in nature, which may be

seen by some as a decided advantage.

…

Among the disturbing structural changes taking place is the ever-expanding power of

the multinational corporations; we should not deceive ourselves for a moment as to

the relative indifference of these conglomerates to the welfare of the society in which

they happen to be based. Under their hegemony, patriotism is transformed into an

absurdity and regional differentiation is a factor to be eliminated. What they value

most is a universal, undifferentiated abacus upon which the ebb and flow of value-

free exchange and profit can be facilitated and maintained. (Frampton, 2007, p. 376)

Regionalism should not be sentimentally identified with the vernacular. By definition,

critical regionalism is a recuperative, self-conscious, critical endeavor, and nothing

can be further from the vernacular in the initial sense of the term. Adolf Loos surely

had the last aphoristic word in this regard more than 70 years ago when he wrote:

"The peasant builds a roof. Is it a beautiful roof or an ugly roof? He doesn't know—it

is the roof. It is the roof as his father, grandfather, and great grandfather had built

the roof before him." In other words, the roof and hence the vernacular lies beyond

any kind of evaluation in terms of bourgeois aesthetics. In fact, one of the problems


with the term regionalism arises out of the affix ism since this patently implies the

postulation of a style, that is, of a received set of aesthetic preferences. Critical

regionalism should, in my view, lie beyond style. It should devote itself in the last

analysis to establishment of bounded domains and tactile presences with which to

resist the dissolution of the late-modern world. (Frampton, 2007, p. 376)

I would like to suggest that critically resistant "regions," like "schools," have to be

created. They are, in this sense, necessary myths, as any self-consciously created

culture must be. Far from being merely an illusion, a myth can become a critical and

creative force…Innumerable examples of consciously evoked subcultures may be

drawn from the distant and recent past, from the recent Ticinese school of Mario

Botta et al. to the chain Palladian architecture of the Veneto region; from Wright's

Prairie Style to the second Southern Californian School of Gregory Ain, J. R.

Davidson, H. H. Harris, and Raphael Soriano; from the long history of the

architectural school in Porto of which Alvaro Siza is the most prominent

representative to the young California minimalist-constructivists of today. (Frampton,

2007, p. 380)

In general, we have begun to lose our capacity for distinguishing between

information and experience, not only in architecture, but in everything else as well.

Reality and irreality are deliberately confused and fused together. We oscillate

between the soap opera and world destruction. We are switched, whether we like it

or not, between the blandishments of the commercial and the irreality of terrorism.

…

I dwell on the media because of the extent to which we are conditioned by them,

consciously or otherwise, so much so that we often read buildings as picturesque

images of structures, rather than opening ourselves to a direct experience of their

corporeal form. (Frampton, 2007, p. 381)

…modern urban development has favored the proliferation of a universal, privatized,

placeless domain. I am referring to the universal phenomenon of the Megalopolis,

which was first enthusiastically recognized as such by the French geographer Jean


Gottman. He saw it as the characteristic pattern of urban development throughout

the Northeastern seaboard of the United States and elsewhere. And it was this same

phenomenon that led the planner Melvin Webber to coin such terms as "community

without propinquity" or "non-place urban realm" as slogans with which to rationalize

the total loss of the civic domain in modern society. (Frampton, 2007, p. 382)

Typology is a term that pertains to both civilization and culture. It is clear, for

instance, that the building types of the Enlightenment…were relatively universal.

They were gridded, rational matrices, capable of admitting a wide range of

institutional programs and were applicable to almost any regular site…Topography,

on the other hand, is unequivocally site-specific. It is, so to speak, the concrete

appearance of rootedness itself. Nature, even the manipulated man-made nature, is

the precondition for its being. (Frampton, 2007, p. 382)

…the generic term "architectonic" refers not only to the technical means of

supporting the building but also to the mythic reality of this structural achievement;

that is, it should display the way in which the artifice interacts with nature, not only

in terms of gravity, but also in terms of its durability with regard to the agencies of

climate and time…Scenography, on the other hand, comes from the Latin word scena

and from frons scenae, meaning scene, and is thus essentially representational in

nature…we can easily see how the current tendency to reduce built form to images

or scenography only serves to further an imagistic reception and perception of the

built form. As Marco Frascari reminds us, the suppression of construction through the

elimination of framework or the masking of the joints deprives architecture of its

expressiveness, so that the architectonic significance of the work becomes

obfuscated and mute. (Frampton, 2007, p. 383)

Architecture possesses a marked capacity for being experienced by the entire

sensorium; that is to say, senses other than the optic nerve are involved in

experiencing architecture. Under most circumstances, materials and surfaces can be

as much a part of an overall perception of architecture as the presence of visual

form. Air movement, acoustics, ambient temperature and smell-all these factors

affect our experience of space. (Frampton, 2007, p. 384)


…biological privilege accorded to sight is complemented by strong tactile

experiences…the stress placed upon rationalized sight in the evolution of

Renaissance architecture, i.e., perspective. After the 15th century, the triumphant

legacy of this intellectual construct would exercise a strong hold over the

development of Western space. At its most reductive, this mode of perception tends

to place undue stress on the formal representation. This is often achieved, in our

time, at the expense of tactility. (Frampton, 2007, p. 385)

Post-Modernism and Regionalism

The protagonists of Post-Modernity—that is to say, those who are convinced that the

heroic period of the Modem Movement has come to an end—seem to fall into two

groups: the Neo-Historicists and the Neo-Avant-Gardists. The first, who seem to be

the more prominent in the eyes of the popular press, are those who feel that the

entire apparatus of the avant-garde has been discredited and that no choice remains

but to abandon this ostensibly radical discourse and to return to tradition. The

second, while repudiating global utopias, seem to welcome nonetheless the

continuing escalation of modernization as an inevitable process. They see this

process positively as one which, despite its predominantly technical character,

contains within its nature the liberative and "creative" forms of the future. Of the two

groups it may be claimed that the second is the more realistic and consistent in that

modernization continues in any case…Regionalism, in my view, constitutes the

potential, interstitial middle ground between these two irreconcilable "Post-Modem"

positions…it does nonetheless offer a critical basis from which to evolve a

contemporary architecture of resistance—that is, a culture of dissent free from

fashionable stylistic conventions, an architecture of place rather than space, and a

way of building sensitive to the vicissitudes of time and climate. Above all, it is a

concept of the environment where the body as a whole is seen as being essential to

the manner in which it is experienced. (Frampton, 2007, p. 385)


Lucy Lippard

Lippard (b. 1937) has been an international art critic and historian since the mid-

1960s, focusing mostly on feminist and theoretical issues in contemporary art. She has

published over twenty books, including volumes that address art in the way it connects

to places and politics. Her career also includes personal activism, editorship, curatorial

work, and performance art. The Lure of the Local puts regionalist art production in the

context of larger questions in contemporary art, usually skewering the hegemony of the

cultural elites located in cultural capitals.

Lippard, L. R. (1997). The lure of the local: Senses of place in a multicentered

society. New York: New Press.

Community is as elusive a concept as home in this millennial culture. The word

community is often used as a euphemism for poor neighborhoods and small towns,

the false assumption being that people are huddled together there with nobody to

depend upon but each other, and that they all get along more or less fine. Yet

community can also be denied those deemed too poor, ignorant, or criminal to

support each other—hardworking families living in the South Bronx, for instance. In

fact, community can be created, and denied, anywhere. The struggle for survival can

set communities at each other’s throats; neighborhoods can cover the absence of

“community” by creating its façade through social conventions. The Boy Scouts, PTA,

Rotary Club, Masons, Elks, golf and bridge clubs may simulate communal elements

even as members prefer to stay out of their neighbors’ business (the Kitty Genovese

syndrome) and to have the world’s business stay out of their neighborhoods (the

NIMBY or “Not In My Backyard” syndrome). (Lippard, 1997, p. 23)

I often find myself conflating place and community. Although they are not the same

thing, they coexist. A peopled place is not always a community, but regardless of the

bonds formed within it, or not, a common history is being lived out. Like the places

they inhabit, communities are bumpily layered and mixed, exposing hybrid stories

that cannot be seen in a linear fashion, aside from those “preserved” examples which


usually stereotype and oversimplify the past. As community artists can testify, it

takes a while to get people to discard their rose-colored glasses and the fictional

veneer of received “truths.” Community doesn’t mean understanding everything

about everybody and resolving all the differences; it means knowing how to work

within differences as they change and evolve. (Lippard, 1997, p. 24)

A starting point, for artists or for anyone else, might be simply learning to look

around where you live now. What Native peoples first inhabited this place? When

was your house built? What’s the history of the land use around it? How does it fit

into the history of the area? Who lived there before? What changes have been made

or have you made? If you’ve always lived there, what is different now from when you

were young? If you haven’t, what’s different from where you were raised and from

when you moved there? What is your house’s relation to others near it and the

people live in them? How does its interior relate to the exterior? Does the style and

decoration of either reflect your family’s cultural background, the places from which

your people came? If not, why not? Is there a garage? Is there a lawn? a garden?

Have you cut down trees or planted them? Is the vegetation local or imported? Is

there water to sustain it? Do any animals live there? Have they always been there?

Are there more or less of them? What do you see from your favorite window? What

does the view mean to you? How does it change with seasons and time? And so on

and on. (Lippard, 1997, p. 25)

Place is most often examined from the subjective viewpoint of individual or

community, while “region” has traditionally been more of an objective geographic

term, later kidnapped by folklorists. In the fifties, a region was academically defined

as a geographic center surrounded by “an area where nature acts in a roughly

uniform manner.” Today a region is generally understood not as a politically or

geographically delimited space but one determined by stories, loyalties, group

identity, common experiences and histories (often unrecorded), a state of mind

rather than a place on a map. Perhaps the most accurate definition of a region,

although the loosest, is Michael Steiner’s; “the largest unit of territory about which a

person can grasp ‘the concrete realities of the land,’ or which can be contained in a

person’s genuine sense of place.” (Lippard, 1997, p. 34)


“Regionalism”—named and practiced as either a generalized, idealized “all-

Americanism” or a progressive social realism—was most popular in the thirties when,

thanks to hard times, Americans moved voluntarily around the country less than

they had in the twenties or would in the fifties. During the Great Depression, the

faces and voices of “ordinary people” became visible and audible, through art,

photographs, and journalism, and had a profound effect on New Deal government

policy. John Dewey and other scholars recognized that local life became all the more

intense as the nation’s identity became more confusingly diverse and harder to

grasp…The preoccupation with regionalism was a “search for the primal spatial

structure of the country…[for] the true underlying fault lines of American culture.”

(Lippard, 1997, p. 34)

In the art world, the conservative fifties saw regionalism denigrated and dismissed,

in part because of its political associations with the radical thirties, in part because

its narrative optimism, didactic oversimplification, and populist accessibility was

incompatible with the Cold War and out of sync with the sophisticated, individualist

Abstract Expressionist movement, just then being discovered as the tool with which

to wrench modern art away from Parisian dominance. Today the term regionalism,

most often applied to conventional mediums such as painting and printmaking,

continues to be used pejoratively, to mean corny backwater art flowing from the

tributaries that might eventually reach the mainstream but is currently stagnating

out there in the boondocks. (Lippard, 1997, p. 35)

In fact, though, all art is regional, including that made in our “art capital,” New York

City. In itself extremely provincial, New York’s art world is rarely considered

“regional” because it directly receives and transmits international influences. The

difference between New York and “local” art scenes is that other places know what

New York is up to but New York remains divinely oblivious to what’s happening off

the market and reviewing map. Yet, paradoxically, when the most sophisticated

visitors from the coasts come to “the sticks,” they often prefer local folk art and

“naïve” artists to warmed-over syntheses of current big-time styles. (Lippard, 1997,

p. 36)


Why does this very local art often speak so much more directly to those who look at

a lot of art all over the place? What many of us find interesting and energetic in the

“regions” is a certain “foreignness” (a variation on the Exotic Other) that, on further

scrutiny, may really be an unexpected familiarity, emerging from half-forgotten

sources in our own local popular cultures. Perhaps it is condescending to say that a

regional art is often at its best when it is not reacting to current marketplace trends

but simply acting on its own instincts; the word “innocent” is often used. But it can

also be a matter of self-determination. Artists are stronger when they control their

own destinies and respond to what they know best—which is not necessarily related

to place. Sometimes significant work is done by those who have never (or rarely)

budged from their place, who are satisfied with their lives, and work out from there,

looking around with added intensity and depth because they are already familiar with

the surface. These artists may seem marginal even to their local art world, but not to

their own audiences and communities. (Lippard, 1997, p. 36)

It has been argued that there is no such thing as regionalism in our homogenized,

peripatetic electronic culture, where all citizens have theoretically equal access to the

public library’s copy of Art in America if not to the Museum of Modern Art (which

costs as much as a movie). On another level altogether, middle-class museum-goers

living out of the centers do become placeless as they try to improve and appreciate,

and in the process learn to distrust their own locally acquired tastes. They are

usually unaware that mainstream art in fact borrows incessantly from locally rooted

imagery as well as from the much-maligned mass cultures—from Navajo blankets to

Roman Catholic icons to Elvis to Disney. (Lippard, 1997, p. 36)

Most artists today come from a lot of places. Some are confused by this situation and

turn to the international styles that claim to transcend it; others make the most of

their multicenteredness. Some of the best regional art is made by transients who

bring fresh eyes to the place where they have landed. They may be only in

temporary exile from the centers (usually through a teaching job), but they tend not

to waste their time bewailing their present location or getting away whenever

possible. They are challenged by new surroundings and new cultures and bring new


material into their art. As Ellen Dissanayake has observed, the function of art is to

“make special”; as such, it can raise the “special” qualities of place embedded in

everyday life, restoring them to those who created them. Yet modernist and some

postmodernist art, skeptical of “authenticity,” prides itself on departing from the

original voices. (Lippard, 1997, p. 36)

If art is defined as “universal,” and form is routinely favored over content, then

artists are encouraged to transcend their immediate locales. But if content is

considered the prime component of art, and lived experience is seen as a prime

material, then regionalism is not a limitation but an advantage, a welcome base that

need not exclude outside influences but sifts them through a local filter. Good

regional art has both roots and reach. (Lippard, 1997, p. 37)

If landscape is a way of seeing, there are potentially as many landscapes as

individual ways of seeing, or at least as many as cultural ways of seeing—although

some people seem threatened by this degree of multiplicity. Otherness and

familiarity are reinforced by impressions of landscape. Backgrounds inevitably affect

foregrounds. Part of the yearning for a homeland left behind is a sense of space and

place that differs from the hybrid one that has come to be seen as generically

“American.” Given a choice, people often immigrate to geographies that remind them

of home. (Lippard, 1997, p. 61)

While the notion of place in art has become more broadly interesting to artists and

institutions in the last few years, it is applied so generally as to become locally

meaningless. Everything from art criticism to cultural representations to conventional

paintings is embraced as a “place”; “location” has become as abstracted as identity

and culture, just as the word site has long since departed the geographical realm for

that of the broadly understood “social site” [and now, ‘web site’]. Borders,

boundaries, margins, peripheries, migrations, and centers have become ubiquitous

terms and are bandied about with little connection to lived experience. In fact, this

phenomenon could be read as part of the deracinating process by which art, like its

makers, has been cut loose from any real location and has been forced to create its

own. (Lippard, 1997, p. 277)


…a profoundly local public art has not caught on in the mainstream because in order

to attract sufficient buyers in the current system of distribution, art must be

relatively generalized, detachable from politics and pain (not to mention ugliness).

Yet an exhibition about place which ignores its location is a masquerade. We need

[at least] some artists to draw back from abstractions and consider shared

experiences. (Lippard, 1997, p. 278)

A “place ethic” demands a respect for a place that is rooted more deeply than an

aesthetic version of “the tourist gaze” provided by imported artists whose real

concerns lie elsewhere or back in their studios. Suzanne Lacy describes a spectrum

of artists’ roles from private to public as experiencer, reporter, analyst, and activist.

But to make an effective art of place, an artist must be all of these things. The field

is necessarily interdisciplinary. In conventional theme shows about place, outsiders

may bring fresh eyes and insights, and they can make wonderful things that have

little to do with the host site. Such works might qualify as significant art about place

but certainly not art of place. Even Lacy’s description of the culturally democratic

approach involuntarily exposes the shortcomings of a “visiting artist”: “The artist

enters, like a subjective anthropologist, the territory of the other, and presents

observations of people and places through an awareness of her own interiority. In

this way the artist becomes a conduit for the experience of many others, and the

work a metaphor for relationship.” (Lippard, 1997, p. 278)

Barbara Allen

Allen (b. 1956), director of the graduate program in Science and Technology

Studies at Virginia Tech, draws on the work of French social philosopher Pierre

Bourdieu and performance studies to place “regionalism” on a spectrum of active and

performative constructions of identity and to expose the biases (particular gender

biases) inherent in those actions. She argues that formal issues play too large a role in

the dominant understanding of “critical regionalism” and that deemphasizing the very


cultural practices which create the conditions for such regionalism to be possible

prevents design from accessing and preparing a stage for the things which make

regional life meaningful to people.

“On Performative Regionalism” was first published here in V. B. Canizaro (Ed.),

Architectural regionalism: collected writings on place, identity, modernity, and

tradition (2007). New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Broadly speaking, culture is the totality of our behaviors, beliefs, customs, habits,

and knowledge…Given this definition of culture, I argue that regionalism in

architecture should be, in large part, based on the spatial dimensions of people's

practices and normative behaviors. So any investigation of regionalism must begin

with an investigation into what people actually do in that region that marks them as

part of that place.

A region is a socially constructed concept. I define a region as a collection of shared

geographically located identities. It is a locale in which people share an identity, or at

least participate in compatible social practices. (Allen, 2007, p. 422)

Regionalism can be thought of in the active sense as a relationship between people

and their place of performance…"A performative act," according to the literary

definition, "is one which brings into being or enacts that which it names, and so

marks the constitutive or productive power of the discourse." Thus performativity is

defined by iterative acts, verbal and physical, that serve to instill norms, at the same

time concealing the conventions or Foucauldian power force behind the acts.

[Examples of the above:]

…Once a statement is released forecasting certain economic futures, these futures

are often manifest as the result of the economists' statements. Thus economics could

be said to be self-constituted via its own performance, which, in turn, also neatly

conceals the power structures behind the forecasts…Gender is not an inherent

characteristic or a by-product of one's biological sex, but instead is the performance

of a gender role, the fulfillment of a social or cultural definition of a gender…So our


identity can be understood as constituted by our actions and behavior, and those

actions and behaviors are influenced by the places and cultures from which we

come—it is a reflexive process. (Allen, 2007, p. 422)

A second helpful conceptual lens through which to read regionalism is Pierre

Bourdieu's habitus…Habitus is a "durably installed generative principle of regulated

improvisations [that] produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities" in

social life…Habitus is best understood as part of a field of variables and dynamic

interactions that would also include the physical space in which practices and social

norms take place.

…But does regionalism have to apply to broad geographic parts of a nation or state,

or can we have micro-regions within cities? Can parts of a metropolis defined by

ethnic and racial differences be defined as regions of a city? For purposes of inclusion

the answer would be "yes." But there are deeper reasons why these micro-regions

should be considered very important in the landscape of regional thought. The

overarching concept that permeates regionalism is inherently conservative. It can

serve as a ubiquitous norm that is applied everywhere even though there is no set of

rules or laws enforcing the norm or way of life. The statement "that's how we do

things around here" captures this subtle social force. Sometimes, such regional or

local norms serve to make invisible and unchangeable inherently unjust local ways of

life. (Allen, 2007, p. 423)

Once the spatial dimensions of human activities are satisfied, the visual appearance

of the built environment is open. Some think regionalism is equivalent to a sort of

sentimental style. Far from it. Style, understood performatively, is an open domain.

Designing with a reference to a region's architectural history and traditional building

materials should be considered, but what architects can bring to a place and people

can go much deeper. Performative regionalism provides an understanding of the

interaction of people and place that allows architecture to be understood as, in part,

an enabler of cultural practices.

…performative regionalism emphasizes the fact that architects often come to projects

as outsiders, not part of the culture for which they design. Requiring a deeply

cultural and perceptive understanding of everyday life as part of the design process


expands opportunities for cultural insight on the part of designers. Often when one is

inside one's own culture, its norms are invisible. It is difficult to see the things that

define us. It can take an outsider, a "valuable stranger," to see the cultural behaviors

that locals do not. (Allen, 2007, p. 426)

Regionalism in Graphic Design

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