This fall the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art opened its new academic building on its Cooper Square campus in New York’s East Village. Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, the building has quickly become one of the city’s new landmarks. Abbott Miller has designed a unique program of signage and environmental graphics for the building that is fully integrated with the building’s dynamic architecture.
Miller is a Cooper alumnus—this year he received the school’s prestigious Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award—and he knew the campus well. The new academic building, located at 41 Cooper Square, sits directly across Third Avenue from the Cooper Union’s original 1859 building, called the Foundation building. Like Mayne’s architectural design, Miller’s graphics for the new building establish a dialogue with the older structure.
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Quick Link: Lisa Strausfeld at SEGD Dynamic Environments
The Art Institute of Chicago recently opened its Modern Wing, a stunning 264,000 square foot expansion designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. The wing is devoted to the museum’s modern and contemporary art, photography and design collections. The Art Institute has long been one of the world’s great encyclopedic museums, and the addition of the wing officially makes it the second-largest art museum in the U.S. As part of the expansion Abbott Miller was commissioned to create a new identity for the museum as well as a comprehensive program of interior and exterior environmental graphics.
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Quick Link: London Science Museum War Memorial on the CR Blog
The wall-mounted war memorial designed by Harry Pearce for the London Science Museum is a reverential and sober tribute to those employees of the museum that fell in the First and Second World Wars. The plaque is made from a single piece of cast iron layered with typographic interventions that are powerful in their simplicity. Each layer represents a world war with ‘19’ serving as a link between the two sets of dates ’14-18′ and ’39-45′. A single cross is cut through both layers.
Harry previously designed the graphics for the museum’s Launchpad interactive gallery and Dana Centre.
Additional views of the memorial after the jump.
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Quick Link: Doomed US Border Signage in Fast Company
Quick Link: MAD Media in segdDESIGN
The suite of dynamic informational and interpretive media installations at the Museum of Arts and Design.
When the Museum of Arts and Design started planning the move to its new home at 2 Columbus Circle in New York, it wanted to find a new way to guide visitors through the space and the museum collection. Lisa Strausfeld and her team were commissioned to develop a program of dynamic media for the museum, including directory and wayfinding displays and interpretive installations for the galleries. Developed in conjunction with our identity, the unified media and signage program makes reference to the building’s architecture while also reinforcing the museum’s mission to celebrate the creative process. The program puts MAD at the forefront of the use of dynamic and interactive technologies in museum environments.
The MAD media installations have won a Bronze in the Environments category of the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), presented by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), BusinessWeek, Target and Autodesk. The MAD program was also recently recognized with an Honor Award from the Society for Environmental Graphic Design. Strausfeld herself was a Finalist in the Interaction Design category of the 2009 National Design Awards, honored last week in a ceremony at the White House.
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The suite of dynamic informational and interpretive media installations at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Our program of dynamic informational and interpretive media for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York has won a Bronze in the Environments category of the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards, announced today. The awards are co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), BusinessWeek, Target and Autodesk.
The IDSA jury recognized the project for its use of dynamic and interactive technologies in a museum environment. Designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team, the media were developed as an integral part of MAD’s new home at 2 Columbus Circle and include animated directory and wayfinding displays and interpretive installations that let visitors explore the museum’s permanent collection. The program was developed in conjunction with the identity we designed for the museum.
Abbott Miller’s exhibition design for the Harley-Davidson Museum was a Finalist in the Environments category of the awards.
We were pleased to pick up The New York Times this morning and see, on the front page, the landmark sign we designed for the border crossing station at Massena, New York. But sad, too, since this will be the last time anyone will see it. The sign, bold 21-foot-tall yellow letters reading UNITED STATES, is being removed this week for reasons of national security.
Approved in 2007 as part of the station design by Smith-Miller & Hawkinson, the sign was up for less than a month before officials decided it was, in fact, a little too bold. “The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention,” a spokeswoman for the Customs and Border Protection Agency told the Times. “Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid.”
Times architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff praised not only the building but the sign, noting the way the latter “communicates openness and possibility, not aggression.” He added, “It is hard to see how values like those would make any building a target. They may even seem like something worth defending.”
