Stauffacher Solomon was the project's graphic designer and worked on promotional materials and the Sea Ranch logo. She created it in the shape of an abstract ram's horns (wide, curly Y-shapes). Reincarnation as a sheep ranch and the sea.
The architects sited Sea Ranch's athletic club, which includes tennis courts, a swimming pool, and locker rooms, on a berm they created to protect it from the wind. The interior walls were finished with unfinished plywood, and due to lack of money the interior was entrusted to Mrs. Stauffacher Solomon. With the help of a local sign painter, she spent three days creating a massive spatial illusion of bold diagonal lines, circles, arrows, letters and bull's-eye blocks of color. “Be happy, kid.” her contractor told her.
“Here was some serious architecture trying to blend in with the surrounding barns and landscape,” said Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMOMA’s curator of architecture and design, who, with Joseph Becker, wrote “The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment; and Idealism”. An exhibition with the same title was also planned in 2018. “And Bobbie paints the development name on the outside of the main lodge in bold Helvetica font and draws amazing graphics in the exercise center’s showers. Perhaps to the architect's outrage, it became the cover image of an architecture magazine and ushered in the beginnings of environmental supergraphics.
“Like Barbie, she was very smart, a bit naughty and ahead of her time,” she added.
Stauffacher Solomon's work graced the cover of Progressive Architecture magazine. One of the magazine's editors, C. Ray Smith, noticed that other designers and architects across the country were flipping their spaces like she was, so he declared her movement Paint as Architecture and called it supergraphic. In the era of Pop Art and Op Art, supergraphics would “destroy architectural planes, distort corners, and explode the rectangular boxes we construct into rooms,” Mr. Smith wrote.
Sea Ranch has become a place of pilgrimage for architecture lovers and, inevitably, a community of expensive second homes. Mr. Stauffacher Solomon often said that real estate won. She also worked on projects in San Francisco, New York, and Europe.