Columbia GSAPP: On the Edge of Legibility symposium
In April 2026, the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) hosted a symposium titled On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and Its Peripheries. Panelists from around the world presented research across a diverse range of subjects that responded to Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman’s theory of the Freedom of the Periphery and French poet Edouard Glissant’s call for the right to opacity.
No specific architectural movement, country, time period, or material encapsulated the whole theme. The identity needed to represent an abstract idea and diverse subject matter, so we focused on the themes of anti-colonialism, nature, indigenous knowledge, and humanism.
I transformed a photograph of found salt residue left by a snowstorm into the graphical motif that underpins the identity. It visualizes the act of unearthing complex and layered knowledge that lives in the periphery and develops over time.
Brown, orange, yellow, and green nod to the earthy and human nature of the periphery. Opposite of artificial, modern, and nationalistic.
Tightly setting the lengthy symposium title in KK Topo conveys a sense of illegibility and amorphousness, without obscuring the information.
Everything else is presented in a clear and direct voice with Compadre Narrow, which echoes the all caps forms of the title and has an architectural quality to it. We chose to avoid serif typefaces due to their association with Western tradition and dominant academic culture.
For the symposium program body typeface, we introduced Source Serif 4 to the system. Its transitional serif forms provide readability and a casual voice to the dense research abstracts provided by the panelists.
During the initial exploration, we considered other ways to convey illegibility and geography through imagery, typography, and composition.
The symposium organizers ultimately preferred the movement of the final poster design over these options.
