New School University Center wayfinding system

Ruedi Baur had worked with Irma before. At the Musée Rodin in Paris, and again at the Centre Pompidou’s sister institution in Metz, Baur shaped identity and wayfinding programs around customized versions of Typotheque’s caps-only display sans. His use of Irma for the New School’s University Center on Fifth Avenue in New York marks Bauer’s first commission in the United States.

The New School wanted a hub for its scattered urban campus. Roger Duffy’s team at SOM delivered a multiuse vertical facility on a tight footprint: 370,000 square feet filling sixteen stories (seven for academic programming, the remaining nine for dormitories) with façades on Fourteenth Street, Fifth Avenue, and Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village. SOM’s decision to move circulation from core to perimeter generated the structure’s most compelling design element: faceted-glass stairwells slicing diagonally through the building’s bronze-shingled curtain walls.

The perimeter stairs drew Baur in from the outset, providing the call to his graphic response. Working with Typotheque’s Peter Biľak, Baur overlaid Irma Light on Irma Black, building the illusion of dimension and perspective into a reimagined, site-specific typeface for wayfinding and supergraphics.

“Initially the design team had proposed a similar layering with Gotham, but Biľak waived his licensing fee for the University Center project,” David Sokol wrote in 2014 for eg Magazine. (Landmark, which arguably could have been a viable candidate for this project, had not yet been released when New School provost Tim Marshall sought Baur out in early 2012.)

Each floor has its own font. The letterforms start flat and straightforward and take on added dimension the higher one rises within the building; shifts in perspective provide directional cues. With a glance, students and other visitors are subliminally oriented. “When you understand the system, you can say, ‘I’m at the top’ or ‘I’m near the bottom,’” Baur told the New York Times.

Wayfinding is an especially intimate design form because it communicates, implicitly or explicitly, in the imperative mode: “Go this way.” Among practitioners who view type as the fundamental unit and starting point for any design program — and Baur most assuredly does; he has said that he increasingly considers himself a “typographer” — there appear to be at least two divergent approaches. The first, more abstract, prioritizes legibility and readability; think of Adrian Frutiger’s influential wayfinding system for Roissy.

The second approach begins with type and blows it up, blows it apart, makes it iconic. Deborah Sussman’s faceted type for Joseph Magnin comes to mind. For Baur, too, letterforms progress from functional to expressive; they are never discreet. Their communication moves beyond the purely textual to the gestural, the sensory. Baur traffics in experience and muscle memory.

Not surprisingly, this approach has attracted criticism. Baur’s wayfinding system for the Vienna Airport, for example, was deemed illegible by people with impaired vision, leading him to modify some of the signs. But he is nothing if not a vigorous and eloquent defender of his design process, to which he has clearly given extensive thought.

Start with function — “putting the right information in the right place,” Baur said in an interview with Andy Butler — and then proceed to expression, which, he added, “is not always common in modern signage, but I feel that a signage system can add to the experience of a place if it helps set the scene.”

If Baur necessarily concerns himself at first with immediate reading comprehension and instruction — go this way; you are here; this is what this room is for — he knows that wayfinding and supergraphics need to move beyond that to a more encompassing sensemaking. And so he introduces shadow and dimension: allusive, rather than realistic, markers of orientation in time and space.