The Pentagram Papers

1. ABC: A Dictionary of Graphic Cliches
Year: 1975
Pentagram published the first three letters of a dictionary of visual metaphors drawn together by Philip Thompson and Peter Davenport. It contains examples of how designers have used these clichés as a shorthand visual language to communicate complex ideas.

ABC: A Dictionary of Graphic Cliches
Year: 1975

2. The Pessimist Utopia
Year: 1975
Theo Crosby argued the case for personalising commercial buildings through art and design in order to preserve the humanity of the urban environment. He explained that ’the artist’s role is to assert the tangible, the tactile, the human scale; to give some life, humour and amusement to our pompous buildings.’

The Pessimist Utopia
Year: 1975

3. Brushes and Brooms
Year: 1976
Lou P. Klein was head of graphic design at London’s Royal College of Art. He started collecting brushes and brooms out of an aesthetic appreciation for their design which gradually developed into an interest in materials as well as how the tools were used.

Brushes and Brooms
Year: 1976

4. Face to Face
Year: 1977
While working at Pentagram in London, Jean Edouard Robert (later the designer of the first Swatch watch faces) started photographing accidental faces in everyday objects. Having enlisted the assistance of his brother François, their collection now numbers more than one thousand published in five books.

Face to Face
Year: 1977

5. The Palace of the League of Nations
Year: 1978
To illustrate his view that architecture does not occur in isolation, but springs from a historical and social context, Ron Herron studied entries into the competition for the design of the Palace of the League of Nations in 1926-27, highlighting how each was informed by events occurring at the time.

The Palace of the League of Nations
Year: 1978

6. Would You Care to Make a Contribution?
Year: 1979
British artist and designer Brian Love’s collection of charity ephemera tells a tale of the charitable causes that the British have championed over the years. Included among the thousands of items in Love’s collection are amusing ploys used by fundraisers to attract money.

Would You Care to Make a Contribution?
Year: 1979

7. Ragazzini: Photographs of Bomarzo
Year: 1980
Enzo Ragazzini captured sculptures of mythical characters from the gardens of Bomarzo, Italy. Weatherworn, moss covered and neglected, they emerge from the undergrowth as if created by nature. This Paper is the only one designed as a loose-sheet portfolio of photographic prints.

Ragazzini: Photographs of Bomarzo
Year: 1980

8. Views From Pentagram, New York
Year: 1981
Views from Pentagram’s seventeenth floor office taken by Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson with the location of each building numbered to correspond with the isometric street drawing shown on the cover.

Views From Pentagram, New York
Year: 1981

9. Unilever House: Towards a New Ornament
Year: 1983
This Paper, which records the refurbishment of Unilever House, involves commissions for original artwork created by contemporary craftspeople. Theo Crosby records his stand against what he saw as the crude and bland construction methods of some contemporary architecture.

Unilever House: Towards a New Ornament
Year: 1983

10. 1211 North LaSalle
Year: 1983
Richard Haas was commissioned to paint a trompe l’oeil mural on a drab apartment building, transforming it into a fantastic homage to Chicago architecture. François Robert chronicled the work in progress over a ninety-day period.

1211 North LaSalle
Year: 1983

11. The City of Tomorrow: Model 1937
Year: 1984
In 1937, Shell Oil commissioned a model from Norman Bel Geddes to demonstrate how traffic would flow in 1960. The model city was used in advertisements that year and, interestingly, the imagined city is a close approximation of what we see today.

The City of Tomorrow: Model 1937
Year: 1984

12. Olivier Mourgue’s Little Theatre of Design
Year: 1985
Best known for his furniture and film sets Olivier Mourgue built a suitcase containing sets and props which when unpacked creates an impromptu theatre even down to tiny front-row benches for his imaginary audience. This Paper documents how the suitcase was unpacked and the scenes created.

Olivier Mourgue’s Little Theatre of Design

13. Imprimeries Clandestines
Year: 1986
This reprint from Le Point contains first person accounts of the French writers and printers who risked their lives to form the underground publishing house Les Editions de Minuit, which published twenty-five volumes during the Nazi occupation. The photographs were taken by Robert Doisneau, who worked for the French Resistance during World War II.

Imprimeries Clandestines
Year: 1986

14. Stars & Stripes
Year: 1987
Kit Hinrichs has been collecting Stars and Stripes objects for nearly forty years. There have been 27 official flags since the nation’s inception as a new star is added each time a state is inducted into the Union. With no official design guidelines until 1912, when the last star was added, there was a lot of scope for variety.

Stars & Stripes
Year: 1987

15. Through the Window
Year: 1985
Published in 1924, Through the Window was compiled by Ed. J. Burrow & Co. Ltd. for the Great Western Railway. It describes points of interest that passengers could see as the train travelled from London Paddington to Penzance. Simply and beautifully executed, it parcels out information in six-mile increments.

Through the Window
Year: 1985

16. Kingswalden Notes
Year: 1989
The journal kept by Quinlan Terry when he was working on Kings Walden Bury, a new country house built between 1969 and 1971 in Hertfordshire, England. The notes, reproduced in full, reveal the thinking of one of the 20th century’s most ardent champions of classical architecture.

Kingswalden Notes
Year: 1989

17. The Many Faces of Mao
Year: 1989
The cult of Chairman Mao generated thousands of likenesses in various materials. Buttons grew so large that Mao himself asked citizens to stop because the aluminium used to make them was creating a shortage in plane manufacturing. By the early 1970s, Mao buttons disappeared from public view.

The Many Faces of Mao
Year: 1989

18. Skeleton Closet
Year: 1990
Steven Guarnaccia’s collection and drawings of the skeletal form includes toys, functional objects and art prints from all over the world. Like the folk art produced for the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, many of the skeleton objects are personified and even shown in everyday life settings.

Skeleton Closet
Year: 1990

19. Purple, White and Green
Year: 1992
Items mainly drawn from the Museum of London depicting the graphic identity invented by the Suffragette movement to advertise their cause. Purple stood for dignity, white for purity and green for hope. In 1918, the Suffragette movement achieved its aim when women won the vote.

Purple, White and Green
Year: 1992

20. Architecture
Year: 1993
A reprint of a pamphlet entitled ’Architecture’ by Lewis Mumford, published in 1926 by the American Library Association. It cogently and concisely explains the value of architecture that the Pentagram partners decided new generations would find it of interest.

Architecture
Year: 1993

21. Crop Circles
Year: 1993
This Paper contains simplified black and white silhouettes of crop circle forms made by working with site measurements or aerial photographs. The formations exhibit such an intelligent grasp of proportions, symmetry and construction that Pentagram felt they deserved to be brought to public attention.

Crop Circles
Year: 1993

22. Architectural Toys
Year: 1995
Paul Neuman’s collection of architectural toys, as described by Pentagram partner James Biber: ’They combine, in deceptive simplicity and harmony, all the disciplines, the vision, and the talent a designer may hope for. They are at once graphics and architecture, product and package, model and reality.’

Architectural Toys
Year: 1995

23. Cigar Papers
Year: 1995
Traditionally, Cuban cigars reveal their provenance and quality through banding, wrapping, boxing and seals often decorated with gold foil and vivid colours. Here Juliet Barclay shares her research into the graphic significance of cigar packaging. In keeping with the contents, the cover is stamped with gold foil.

Cigar Papers
Year: 1995

24. The Arms of Paris
Year: 1996
The coat of arms for Paris features a sailing vessel with the motto: ’She floats but she does not sink’. This emblem of Paris is often overlooked despite its omnipresence on hundreds of public buildings, where it has been rendered in virtually every material. Claude Bestel’s photographs are an amazing record of the ships of Paris.

The Arms of Paris
Year: 1996

25. Souvenir Albums
Year: 1996
With halftone printing yet to be invented, the pictures in these souvenir albums were redrawn from photographs so that they could be mass-produced on lithographic presses. Printers used a multi-pass process to achieve a range of tones so that, when varnished, the pictures looked like photographs. The introduction of the Kodak Box Brownie in 1900, as well as new printing technology, led to their demise. A miniature album on the Statue of Liberty is stitched into the centre of the Paper.

Souvenir Albums
Year: 1996

26. On Pride and Prejudice in the Arts
Year: 1997
Sir Ernst Gombrich was invited to speak to the London Art & Architecture Group founded by Theo Crosby to promote collaboration between artists, craftspeople and architects. In order to broaden the audience for this lecture it was reprinted it as a Pentagram Paper.

On Pride and Prejudice in the Arts
Year: 1997

27. Nifty Places: The Australian Rural Mailbox
Year: 1998
Cal Swann was struck by the individuality of the mailboxes in Australia’s outback. He showed his collection of photographs to David Hillman who arranged for them to be published in a Pentagram Paper.

Nifty Places: The Australian Rural Mailbox
Year: 1998

28. Of Money and the Divine
Year: 2000
In an essay adapted from his book ’The Secret Life of Money’, Tad Crawford argues that the origin of money is divine. The Romans depicted the divine origin of money by using sacred symbols on coins and minting money in the temple of Moneta, the goddess of fertility. Vestiges of this can be seen on United States currency, with the motto: ’In God We Trust’.

Of Money and the Divine
Year: 2000

29. Savoy Lights
Year: 2000
The Savoy was the first fully electrified hotel when it opened in 1889 and, while there as part of his commission to create a new graphic identity in the 1990s, John Rushworth noticed that many of the original light fittings remained. True to the understanding of Richard D’Oyly Carte, who built the hotel, lighting had always been used theatrically to create an appropriately luxurious ambiance.

Savoy Lights
Year: 2000

30. Learning from Wildwood, New Jersey
Year: 2001
A selection of the more than 2000 images taken by Dorothy Kresz of Wildwood on the Jersey shore - a working class resort frozen in the 1950s.

Learning from Wildwood, New Jersey
Year: 2001

31. Hinagata: Kimono Pattern Book
Year: 2002
Precursors to the contemporary fashion magazine, the hinagata were essentially catalogues showing the styles and patterns available. To evoke a period feeling, a tactile uncoated paper was used with the caption copy running vertically on the page in a Japanese calligraphic manner.

Hinagata: Kimono Pattern Book
Year: 2002

32. No Waste
Year: 2003
Over a three year period, filmmaker and poet Nelson Rossell and designers Ernesto Oroza and Fabian Martinez, of the Laboratorio de Creación Maldeojo, travelled throughout Cuba in search of ingenious objects made from recycled parts. This Paper was printed on coarse recycled paper with a brown cardboard inner cover peeking through the die-cut stencilled book title.

No Waste
Year: 2003

33. The Slide Rule Vanishes
Year: 2004
For nearly 350 years the slide rule was considered the ultimate calculating tool. As beautiful and complex as fine pocket watches, slide rules are works of art and marvels of science. Lance Knobel’s collection, published here, charts the different variations along with some of their uses.

The Slide Rule Vanishes
Year: 2004

34. Monografias
Year: 2005
Monografias are colourfully illustrated Mexican teaching aids available on every subject from alcoholism to aviation; human evolution to the moon. They run the gamut from no nonsense realism to romanticised interpretations, and were considered by Michael Bierut as interesting examples of information design: concise, wordless and sometimes comic.

Monografias
Year: 2005

35. Tin Tabernacles and Other Buildings
Year: 2006
Invented in 1844 by Phoenix Iron Works in England, corrugated galvanized iron churches, ordered through catalogues, were meant to be temporary. A prefabricated iron church could cost from £150 for a 150-seat chapel to £500 for a 350-seat chapel - a bargain compared to conventional building materials. British photographer and filmmaker Alasdair Ogilvie spent more than 20 years recording the dying traces of these buildings.

Tin Tabernacles and Other Buildings
Year: 2006

36. Marks of Africa
Year: 2006
A little-known tradition of pictographic communication has developed in Africa since prehistoric times. The signs and symbols represent anything from simple identity to the most profound human emotion. This paper is drawn from the collection of the Spanish designer Fernando Medina, who has been studying and re-rendering the symbols since 1997.

Marks of Africa
Year: 2006

37. Forgotten Architects
Year: 2007
Architect Myra Warhaftig has painstakingly researched the fates of the German Jewish architects who were banned from practicing architecture in Germany by the Nazis in 1933. This Paper publishes excerpts from her work.

Forgotten Architects
Year: 2007

38. The Russian Garbo
Year: 2007
The Sten-Frenke house in Santa Monica, California is a lasting monument to the avant-garde in America and a memento of an era when Hollywood was a cauldron of émigré talent and unending optimism. Designed by Richard Neutra in 1934 and with only three owners, the house was completely restored in 2002 by James Biber with Marmol Radziner. Neutra’s legendary chronicler Julius Shulman photographed the house in 2005.

The Russian Garbo
Year: 2007

39. Signs
Year: 2009
The signs created by the homeless have unintentionally become some of the most basic and raw examples of graphic communication in our daily lives. The musician and traveller Joe Ely, who was homeless himself, collects these hand-written signs. This Paper contains photographs of the homeless by Michael O’Brien along with images of their signs by Randal Ford and a foreword by Joe Ely.

Signs
Year: 2009

40. Time Signature
Year: 2010
Hilde Gottschalk was born in 1895. A talented musician, she amassed a remarkable collection of signed concert programmes featuring some of the great musicians of the 20th century. This paper is a record of a lifetime of musical experiences.

Time Signature
Year: 2010

The Pentagram Papers

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