Columbia GSAPP Fall ’24 / Spring ’25 Public Programming Identity
[BACK]
Excited by the uproar and attention generated, both inside and out of the school, by our first year working together, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation invited me to design their annual public programming identity for a second year. Typically, a new designer is invited for the position every year.
Having just graduated from the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, I was eager to continue working with my peers and utilize the artistic research in which I had just engaged. This prompted me to invite Stockholm-based Mika Kastner Johnson to collaborate on the project. After heavy debate and ideation, we decided to visualize an absurdist take on how one might interpret some of society’s artifacts without knowing them firsthand.
We casted things like garbage and cheap toys to poke fun at archeological interpretations of the past. We used typefaces from a wide historical range to invoke a sense of anachronism. We added measurements to the designs that had units such as our own hands counting, or the schedule of the project itself. This led to fun-spirited conversations around theory with faculty, and inside jokes about higher education that fuelled an ultimately fun and collaborative process. Rest in peace James C. Scott.
With such an eclectic system, we could isolate and further explore small portions of our kit of parts, with many sub-identities and events acting more as substantiated and explored graphic worlds within a larger universe. We were curious to explore this in opposition to a typical design system in which a few key motifs adjust incremenetally.
Collaborators include director of exhibitions / curator: Bart-jan Polman, dean: Andrés Jaque, assistant curator: Jean Im, creative director: Ibrahim Kombarji, assistant director of communications: Ilana Curtis, director of internal exhibitions and events: Kendra Sykes, assistant dean of admissions and outreach: Steffen Boddeker, everyone contributed creative feedback.
The yearʼs identity combines imaginary systems of measurement with collages of casted objects encountered in our everyday lives. Animation gave us an opportunity to imagine how an alien archeologist might piece together casted refuse of a ruined Earth, which we timed using the movements of our bodies.
Programming posters with speaker indexes on the rear sides for the ‘24/ ‘25 academic year. We chose an eclectic set of typefaces to create an anachronistic and campy effect that we thought appropriately tongue-in-cheek.
For a special symposium on AI, we fed designs that followed our visual identity to an AI video generation platform with no description, then used the resulting hallucinations to promote the event.
The Spring announcement animation features “The Device,” and our pseudo-measurements are based on the lifespans of apple trees. In an age where everyone is questioning the value of a masterʼs degree, we thought it appropriate to incorporate silver apples.
