USModernist is the largest open digital archive for identifying, recording and preserving Modern homes built in the United States. As it warns on its admittedly Massimo Vignelli–inspired website, “Midcentury Modernist houses are frequently endangered and torn down, largely because buyers, sellers and realtors do not realize the importance of what they have or how to preserve, repair and protect these livable works of art.”
The designer of USModernist’s new refreshed identity, Alexander Isley, says he was given a gift when he was asked to do this job. It brought him back to the fundamentals that Vignelli captured as his signature, while extending its range into the present.
Here, Isley talks about his reverence for midcentury architecture and how he expressed that through his color palette, typography and the “Butterfly Chair” mascot.
I understand there is history for you with George Smart, founder and CEO of USModernist. How did you get involved with this client?
George Smart (known in some circles as “Mr. Modernism”) go back a long way, to around 1970, to be exact. Our fathers were partners in an architectural firm in North Carolina. My dad headed the Durham office, and George’s father headed the Raleigh office. So we knew one another as children from the occasional beach trip and birthday party, but didn’t get to see each other a lot.
George and I kind of lost touch over the years, but when he started what was then called the NCModernist website, I became a fan. (North Carolina is home to the largest number of residential Modernist houses in the U.S., after Florida and California, due to the influence of what was then known as the NC State University School of Design.)
I had no idea …
We reestablished contact a few years ago, and George asked me to create an identity for their “Moon over Modernism” series of house tours and fundraisers.
As the scope and influence of the organization has grown, they assembled a national advisory board and made the decision to upgrade the visual presence of the organization. That’s when George and Chief Advancement Officer Michela O’Connor Abrams (past CEO of Dwell, among other accomplishments) asked my studio to get involved.
What is the actual reach of USModernist in terms of its archival holdings? And where is it physically located?
USModernist is America’s largest open digital archive of Modernist houses. The organization presently documents over 20,500 iconic houses and 130 important architects, and over 4.3 million pages of architecture and design magazines, all online. They add about 1,000 pages of content daily. I still have no idea how they do this, but they clearly have a very efficient scanning operation.
Among some contemporary scholars there is controversy over the use of the terms Modern and Modernist. So many things are called Modern, when they are actually “contemporary” or “Postmodern.” Is USModernist real Modern, Retro Modern or, ahem, faux Modern?
When I think of a “Modern” house in the U.S., I think of something designed between the late 1940s and the end of the ’60s that follow a specific aesthetic and philosophical approach. In terms of housing I think most people get what it means: flat roofs that leak.
The archive includes houses completed up to this day, so it’s probably not a good idea to think in terms of eras but rather approach. On their homepage, USModernist has a nice description of what they mean by “Modernist house.”
Back to your role—what is the context for your visual concept?
When I first saw the existing logo, built around the BKF “Butterfly” chair, I had some questions. Why not a house? But the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. If you were to show a house, which one would it be, and what would you be excluding by being specific?
I think the use of the iconic chair as the signifier for Modern was an inspired choice, and one that I can’t take any credit for. All we did was clean it up and develop a more consistent typographic system.
As part of our work, we also developed a series of associated identifiers for the organization’s events and programs, all using a limited palette of typefaces and a consistent use of red and black.
Red is a trigger color. It represents more than Modern. Do you have any feelings about the color?
Red is bold, simple, and when combined with black, seems to me to be a pretty easy choice to make.
Color is of course subjective, but when I see it in this context I don’t feel a sense of danger or anger or other feelings that might come from seeing red. In developing the new website and communication pieces, I leaned into the red and black, and took cues from Modern master Massimo Vignelli’s theater posters as the foundation for a way to organize information in a formal, easy to understand way. Red and black were famously good enough for him, so they were good enough for me, too.
Personally, I love the look you conceived. Was it love at first sight for the client?
They were very excited and told me this was even better than they were hoping for. I see our work here as more of a refresh, building on the ideas that were already in place. Sometimes the role of a designer is to avoid the temptation to scrap everything and start anew, but rather to build on what’s good and make it better.
In this case, ours was an act of appreciation and preservation—very much in keeping with the ethos of the organization.
You have a lot of components already. Will the graphic scheme grow in any way?
We provided a simple foundation of elements that will allow the look of USModernist to remain consistent as their reach and offerings continue to grow.
I look forward to the expansion of the look throughout the website and email outreach materials and, of course, tote bags and caps. I’ve been inundated with requests for the baseball caps, so we need to do something about this.