Award-winning designer Michael Bierut to lecture at SU School of Architecture

Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram design studio in New York City, will speak at the Syracuse University School of Architecture on Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 5 p.m. in Slocum Hall Auditorium. His lecture, “My Life as a Font,” is co-sponsored by the School of Architecture and SU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and is free and open to the public.

Bierut leads a team of graphic designers who create identity design, environmental graphic design and editorial design solutions. He has won hundreds of design awards, and his work is represented in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Denver Art Museum; the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany; and the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Switzerland.

The following evening, Sept. 16, Syracuse Architecture and COLAB will jointly present “Helvetica,” a feature-length documentary film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture at the Warehouse Auditorium at 5:15 p.m. Bierut, who is interviewed in the film along with other top designers, will introduce the documentary and answer questions afterward.

Prior to joining Pentagram as a partner in 1990, Bierut was vice president of graphic design at Vignelli Associates. He currently serves as a director of the Architectural League of New York and of New Yorkers for Parks. In 1989, Bierut was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale. In 2003 ,he was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. In 2006, he received the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in recognition of his distinguished achievements and contributions to the field. In 2008, he received the Design Mind Award in the National Design Awards presented by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

Bierut is a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art and is a co-editor of the anthology series “Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design” (Allworth Press) and a co-founder of the online journal Design Observer. His commentaries about graphic design in everyday life can be heard nationally on the Public Radio International program “Studio 360.” His book “79 Short Essays on Design” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007) was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2007.