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Pentagram puts a saucy spin on materials for the new Museum of Sex.
By Julie Lasky
The Metropolis Observed
November 2002
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Courtesy Pentagram Design
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It's been something of a tease, but the Museum of Sex finally opened
in September. Plans for the country's first museum devoted to the serious
study of nooky were announced a few years ago. Then came designs by Sharples
Holden Pasquarelli (SHoP) for a building veiled by luminous planes of glass.
That building project has been canceled, but the museum moved ahead, finding
a home in a 15,000-square-foot former retail and office space at Fifth Avenue
and 27th Street in Manhattan. The inaugural exhibition, NYC Sex: How
New York City Transformed Sex in America, will fill the galleries
through July 2003.
For its opening, the museum commissioned a graphic identity program from
Pentagram. "The question was how to make the museum's logo engaging
without seeming prurient," Pentagram partner Michael Bierut says. The
first attempt involved a custom typeface dubbed Erect Extended with
"a perky-looking middle bar on the 'E's.'" But it was too sordid,
Bierut concluded. The second attempt, which rendered "Museum"
as "Musexm" in Trajan, the Metropolitan Museum's typeface, was
too formal. Finally Bierut and Pentagram designer Brett Traylor worked up
a line of Helvetica Neue with an extrabold X. The forthright yet elegant
logo complements an exhibition design by the British firm Casson Mann--a
series of white walls that reveal their contents in windows, but only when
viewed straight on.
Pentagram's entry tickets are somewhat less subtle. They offer a peel-and-stick
letter X that visitors apply to their lapels--after paying the hefty $17
admission fee. The price helps offset the costs of interactive displays
for NYC Sex, which chronicles the history of prostitution, abortion,
censorship, gay activism, and more. Daniel Gluck, the museum's executive
director, estimates an attendance of more than 100,000 by the end of the
exhibition's ten-month run. Visitors must be at least 18 years old.
"What's concealed is more provocative than what's revealed," Bierut
concludes about the museum's identity, including the cover of Pentagram's
catalog for NYC Sex (Scala Publishing, $25). Close inspection of
its pictorial typography reveals a bound woman. "We tried to signal
that this is a real museum with real scholarly work, and yet it deals with
a subject that people have spent many hours musing on a psychiatrist's couch
about."
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