Type@Cooper Lecture Series: Roger Excoffon

Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 6:30 - 8:30pm

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Roger Excoffon and type samples

A free, public lecture on the work of Roger Excoffon, the French type designer, graphic designer, painter, and philosopher.

Registration is required.

Excoffon’s work is a central part of the personality of post-WWII France — the three decades that the French call les trente glorieuses. Perhaps best known for his display types, such as Mistral and Banco, Excoffon spent many years as art director of Marseille’s Fonderie Olive. In the 1950s and ’60s, his work rapidly found its way into the very fabric of everyday life, visible in the tiniest villages of rural France on the awnings of beauty parlors and exterior signs of garages. Beyond his printing types, Excoffon also expressed the fundamental spirit of the times through his posters for Air France, his work in advertising, and his graphic design program for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. He was a prime mover in les Rencontres de Lure, France's equivalent of the Aspen Design Conference. Bruce Kennett, author of W. A Dwiggins: A Life in Design and a previous Lubalin lecturer, returns to take us on a tour of Excoffon's joyful and passionate work.

Located in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, at 41 Cooper Square (on Third Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets)

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.