Barbara Stauffacher was born in 1928 as a third-generation San Franciscan. As a young woman Solomon studied and worked as a dancer, as well as studying painting and sculpture at San Francisco Art Institute. In 1948 she married Frank Stauffacher. Solomon moved to Basel, Switzerland in 1956 after Stauffacher's death to study graphic design at the Basel Art Institute with Armin Hofmann from 1956 to 1959. She made the decision to study design because she knew she could make a living and needed to support herself and her small child. She later studied Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She remarried in 1969 to Daniel Solomon, an architect and professor.
Career
Solomon returned to San Francisco in 1962 and set up an office as a graphic designer where she designed the monthly program guides for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She met landscape architect Lawrence Halprin who gave her work at Sea Ranch in 1968, where she designed the architectural scale paintings for the building interiors, due to her educational background. Her work at Sea Ranch grew from her vocabulary of signs to create motion and an awareness of space. She created the logo for Sea Ranch that was a cross between Swiss design and California impressionalism to interpret the property's rams and crashing waves. Halprin went on to recommend her to other architects in the San Francisco area who let her design what she wanted. She went on to receive two American Institute of Architects awards for her work at Sea Ranch. Solomon was an instructor at Harvard University and Yale University, where she was invited by Charles Moore, whom she had met while working at Sea Ranch, to lead a studio on supergraphics in 1968. The studio was a week-long project creating two-dimensional graphics that reinforced the architecture of Yale University's Art and Architecture elevators. It was wildly successful and herald by Ada Louise Huxtable as a protest against the Establishment. In the short period of its existence from 1970 until 1971 she was art director of Scanlan's Magazine. In 1995, she designed a large outdoor art installation called "Promenade Ribbon" for the city of San Francisco. In 2002, Solomon was a member of the San Francisco Art Commission. In 2015, Solomon works as a landscape architect. Solomon is the author of the book Why? Why not?.
Books
Green Architecture: Notes on the Common Ground, 1982
Solomon's drawings and supergraphics have been included in a number of museum exhibitions In 2018, she created the supergraphic installation Landscape 2018 at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2019, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
