NEW YORK, NY.- Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, an audacious graphic designer, landscape architect and artist who first made a splash in the 1960s with the supersize, geometric architectural painting movement known as supergraphics, died Tuesday at her home in San Francisco. She was 95.

Her daughter Nellie King Solomon confirmed the death.

In 1962, Stauffacher Solomon was the rare woman to set up shop as a graphic designer in the Bay Area, working for clients including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (now SFMOMA). Her style was bold and fresh: often red and black graphics with lots of white space, and always with clean-lined sans serif Helvetica lettering — an astonishing sight at the time in San Francisco, where most lettering was either traditional typefaces like Baskerville and Times Roman or, a bit later, the loopy, trippy, hippie style found on rock posters and album covers.

Stauffacher Solomon had been trained in Basel in the Swiss style of graphic design, which had a modernist ethos: a belief in the power of good design to remake society for the better.

It was architecture, however, that put Stauffacher Solomon on the national stage.

In the early 1960s, an architect turned developer named Al Boeke envisioned a new community on a wind-swept bluff and former sheep ranch a few hours north of San Francisco. With the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr. and Richard Whitaker, he planned a modernist utopia called the Sea Ranch, with common land and buildings shaped by the wild landscape and deference to it.

Stauffacher Solomon was the graphic designer for the project, working on promotional materials and the Sea Ranch logo, which she shaped like abstracted ram’s horns — a broad, curly Y — each horn encircling a spiral nautilus shell, a nod to both the land’s former life as a sheep ranch and to the sea.

The architects had nestled Sea Ranch’s athletic club (a tennis court, a pool and locker rooms) into berms they had created to shield it from the wind. The walls inside were unfinished plywood — money was running out — and they turned the interior over to Stauffacher Solomon. With the help of a local sign painter, she spent three days creating enormous spatial illusions: bold diagonals, circles, arrows, letters and blocks of bull’s-eye colors. “Make it happy, kid,” the contractor told her.

“Here was serious architecture that was trying to blend in with the surrounding barns and landscape,” said Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMOMA’s curator of architecture and design, who, with Joseph Becker, wrote “The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” and curated a 2018 exhibition of the same title. “And Bobbie paints the development’s name right on the exterior of the main lodge in bold Helvetica typeface, and paints a wondrous graphic surprise in the athletic center’s shower rooms, which, perhaps to the architects’ ire, became the cover image in architecture magazines and led to the beginning of environmental supergraphics.

“Like Bobbie,” she added, “it was very clever, a little naughty and ahead of its time.”

Stauffacher Solomon’s work landed on the cover of Progressive Architecture magazine. One of the magazine’s editors, C. Ray Smith, noticing that other designers and architects around the country had been upending space as she had, declared a movement — paint as architecture — and called it supergraphics. In the era of Pop Art and Op Art, supergraphics, Smith wrote, would “destroy architectural planes, distort corners and explode the rectangular boxes that we construct as rooms.”

Sea Ranch became a pilgrimage site for architecture buffs and, inevitably, a pricey second-home community. Real estate won, Stauffacher Solomon often said. She moved on, too, to projects in San Francisco, New York and Europe.

For the nine months of its boisterous run, she was the art director of Scanlan’s Monthly, the impish radical magazine run by Warren Hinckle and Sidney Zion that in 1970 called for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

By the 1970s, she was sick of graphic design. “I could sell anything,” she said. “I could sell LSD.”

She returned to the University of California, Berkeley, which she had attended decades earlier, and, after earning a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in architecture, embarked on a new career as a landscape architect. She often collaborated with the architect Dan Solomon, whom she married in 1969.

Stauffacher Solomon said she had often been undermined because of her gender. When she won a competition to redesign a section of the Tuileries in Paris along with Louis Benech, a French horticulturist, and Pascal Cribier, a French landscape architect, the French government decided it did not want an American woman on the winning team and barred her from participating in its execution.

She made her mark on many other cities, however. With artist Vito Acconci and the modernist architect Stanley Saitowitz, she designed the Ribbon, a 2-1/2-mile public art piece of illuminated glass bricks set into concrete along San Francisco’s Embarcadero sidewalk, which was completed in 1996. The undulating silver signage at the Hunter College subway station at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan is hers, too; she was hired for that work by Ulrich Franzen, the architect responsible for the college’s expansion in 1984.

She also worked on the Turia Gardens in Valencia, Spain, with Ricardo Bofill, the charismatic Spanish modernist, and did projects for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

“It took a lot of verve for Bobbie to survive in a hostile environment, let alone blaze a trail,” Becker said in an interview. “But she had the ability to create these amazing works that reflect her attitude that there should be something fun about the spaces we inhabit. In graphic design, landscape architecture and her books and drawings, she threads the needle between the rational and the playful.”

Her fanciful and surreal drawings were widely exhibited. She began making art books after Rizzoli in 1988 published what had been her master’s thesis, “Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden,” which became a touchstone for a generation of landscape architects and artists; it includes photographs of storied European gardens taken at dawn, when she and her daughter Nellie, an architect and artist, would sneak in, before the gatekeepers arrived.

“My mother always bucked authority,” King Solomon said. “She was raised to question.”

Barbara Ethel Levé was born on Dec. 5, 1928, in San Francisco. Her mother, Lilian Reinhertz Levé, known as Lil, and her father, Fred Levé, a lawyer who represented anarchists, separated when Bobbie was 4.

Lil Levé was hard on Bobbie, her only daughter, who had a talent for ballet and art and in whom her mother saw much revenue potential. The family lived close to the bone, and Bobbie’s mother paid for her dance lessons by playing the piano at the studios she attended.

At 14, Bobbie earned a scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). So that she could attend ballet school while still in high school, her mother wrote a note to her principal saying that she was going blind and that Bobbie needed to work to support her and therefore required long absences from school. The high school mailed her a diploma. By 16, she was performing Spanish dances in nightclubs in her hometown as well as in New York City, Montreal and the Poconos.

Bobbie was 17 when she met Frank Stauffacher, a 30-year-old experimental filmmaker who had brought foreign films like “The Blue Angel” and “Nosferatu” to the Bay Area with his Art in Cinema series, which ran weekly for nearly a decade at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Their social life was heady: Stauffacher had friends like Man Ray, Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp.

Six years later, when their daughter Chloe was 3, Stauffacher died from a brain tumor. Bobbie, Lil and Chloe flew to Switzerland, where education was subsidized by the state, so Bobbie could train as a graphic designer and make a living back home. At the Basel School of Design, she studied under Armin Hofmann, the renowned graphic designer and fomenter of the Swiss style. She was the only American there. She returned to the United States in 1961.

In addition to King Solomon, Stauffacher Solomon is survived by her daughter Chloe Stauffacher and a granddaughter. Her marriage to Solomon ended in divorce.

Stauffacher Solomon won the American Institute of Architects Industrial Arts Medal in 1970, and taught at UC Berkeley, Yale and Harvard, among other institutions. Her work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA and has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Venice Biennale and the Walker Art Center.

In her last decade, Stauffacher Solomon became an art-world darling on the West Coast, with installations at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Los Angeles art space LAXART.

When LAXART’s curators invited her to take over the whole building for her show there in 2019, she rebranded the space RELAXART in enormous letters marching across the gallery’s exterior.

“We said, ‘Take it away,’ and gave her free rein, and she covered the space, inside and out,” said Catherine Taft, its deputy director. “She told us, ‘You guys are my best clients,’ and we had to laugh: ‘We’re an art institution and you’re the artist. We work for you!’ She made such an impact over so many decades. She was absolutely singular.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.