Signs of Cooper Union

November 19, 2009 at 9:51 am
Filed under Architecture, Donor recognition

Pentagram partner Abbott Miller is an alumnus of New York’s Cooper Union, so he was on familiar ground when Pentagram was chosen to develop signage for the new Thom Mayne-designed academic building on the East Village campus. 

The new building sits across Cooper Square from the school’s original 1859 Foundation building. Like Mayne’s architectural design, the signage visually refers to the old building while making a bold new statement of its own. Miller chose the Foundry Gridnik type family because of its similarity to lettering on the Foundation building. But its futuristic and vaguely industrial vibe also complements the materials and forms Mayne used for the new building.

Miller used dimensional type to engage and activate multiple planes and architectural surfaces. The building identity, for example, is optically extruded letterforms that appear “correct” when seen in strict elevation, but distort as the profile of the letter is dragged backwards in space. The top half of the letters, appearing on one plane of the canopy, are dimensional, while the bottom half are cut out of another plane, echoing the transparency of the building’s  skin of perforated stainless steel.

Inside the building, Miller’s dimensional type continues to engage surfaces. It’s extruded around corners, dragged through materials and, in the case of major donor recognition, animates the underside of the stairwell in the lobby’s nine-story atrium. Donor recognition on individual classrooms and offices is rendered on stainless steel bars and wrapped around doorframes to function as corner guards. Elsewhere, the Gridnik type engages with etched glass, stone, and stainless steel.(Photos by Chuck Choi and Iwan Baan) –P.M.K.