TAC Graphics
The Architects Collaborative Inc.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Architectural Signage, Murals, and Banners
Project Description
For PACE International’s office suite entry signage, the Designer brought together the firm’s name in dimensional stainless steel letters and its existing logo in baked enamel, with an illusionary paint scheme in two grays. The resulting composition creates an engaging focal point for a corporate office in an otherwise “dead-end” corridor.
For a set of five, permanent, architectural banners in a TAC-designed gymnasium atrium at Smith College, the Client requested that the theme for each banner be tied to a specific sport and the year that the College began playing that sport: tennis–1881; field hockey–1903; crew–1916; swimming–1897; and basketball–1893. In response, the Designer created a vocabulary of typographic and translated forms derived from equipment and playing environments unique to each sport. Banner colors were chosen to extend the palette of structural elements in the atrium.
For a tile wall in one of TAC’s Kuwait City projects, Gibson was given a design brief with a special challenge: create a mural for an existing wall using fixed quantities of three glazed architectural tiles already purchased for a previous design that was not approved. The Designer’s solution was a simple progression, beginning at one end with a 50/50 mix of the two dark tiles, moving to a solid middle area of the third, beige tile, and then returning to the 50/50 mix of dark tiles at the wall’s far end. The actual progression was generated on TAC’s pre-PC mainframe and output as a working drawing with each tile precisely located and keyed.