Brand Avenue

Cachet by Association

Guess what? Architecture--generated by star architects, laden with signifiers--helps sell stuff: (via)

"High-end architecture is getting hotter," says Ron Smothermon, a Newport Beach ad producer. "More and more modernistic, high-end architecture is flowing through the advertising industry." A wide swath of companies has filmed and photographed Disney Hall for ads since the building opened in 2003, including Microsoft, Sony, Supercuts, Macy's, Vidal Sassoon, Nokia, M&M's, Bass Ale, Oral B and many automobile brands.

Thom Mayne sees nothing wrong with any of this:

Just down the hill from Disney Hall, the ultra-modern Caltrans building is another mecca for advertisers, receiving 36 commercial film and photo shoot requests in 2005, more than any other state-owned building in California. Last year it played host to Nintendo, Sony, MasterCard, Clairol, Mitsubishi, Samsung and others. Which didn't surprise its architect in the least.

"We could anticipate that this would take place," says Mayne, who unveiled the massive Space Age project in 2004. "We had film crews in the building before it was even occupied…. I think this reflects society's continued interest in the present, in something contemporary. Architecture tends to be put under forces that are fairly conservative, and advertising has a different set of rules. It's much more open and willing to explore…. This is another way that buildings are absorbed by the public; it's not a problem — it's not even a good or a bad thing. It just is, and should be."

A high school building by Mayne in suburban LA gains revenue from all the advertising shoots taking place there:

And then there's the money. All location fees feed into the school district coffer — which opens up a new dimension to architecture that hasn't been much considered, Mayne says. "It's an interesting side effect, the building actually producing funds that go back to students. I like the politics of that. It lends the building a secondary value that no one thinks about."

The article asks whether architects' work is being appropriated without proper credit (apparently, architects don't care) but I think the real issue is what the implications of "starchitecture" are. Mayne's point about Diamond Bar High--that consuming architectural imagery is benign so long as it benefits the public--made me think of this. (via)

Wiki-place

I've stumbled across a few websites recently that all share the same pursuit: recording and disseminating shared and individual experiences of place. The "Wiki" approach common to these--where individual contributions of information (aka "citizen journalism") and content add up to a multifaceted composite whole--produces kaleidoscopic results. Check them out. There must be others.

- Wayfaring: a synthesis of Friendster and Google Maps, you create and share personalized maps based on your whims and preferences (your favorite places to drink beer, scuba dive, etc). It's an evolving social network overlaid on an evolving geographic one. Social relationships, consumption, and the physical world, all at the same time.

- Citynoise: "a public photoblog where people with a love for the urban form, modern world, or a general appreciation of their environment gather to post stories, narratives and often upload photos of their favourite cities, hometowns, travels, or current locations." (via)

- 43places: "Share stories about places in your city and around the world." Provocative listing of where its members wish to travel: "Sillykitty wants to go to Amsterdam," for example.

- A View on Cities, "a site dedicated to the sights and attractions in some of the world's greatest cities."

- Archi-Tourist, "a free, Wiki-based travel guide to contemporary architecture around the globe."

- Panaramio, where users upload their photos and cross-reference them with Google Maps, augmenting maps with an ever-expanding, searchable layer of images.

Lessons from Roadsworth

Via Spacing, a fascinating story about a street artist whose work has been caught in a debate about the boundaries between "art" and "vandalism":

The grey area between graffiti and vandalism is more than theoretical for Roadsworth: his controversial street images have turned pavement into politics in the city of Montreal and rekindled debate about the nature of public art. Peter Gibson, the man behind the Roadsworth graffiti identity, began taking to the streets of Montreal in the early mornings of late 2001, spray-painting cyclist symbols on roads to protest the lack of bike lanes and paths in the city. Gradually his street images developed into increasingly symbolic displays of civic and environmental critique: pedestrian crossings on the Plateau Mont-Royal turned into giant footprints; orange stencils of barbed wire lined crosswalks; heart monitor-like spikes and valleys punctuated centre lines on roadways. Bemused Montrealers, many thinking that the city commissioned the road stencils, were left to contemplate the significance of these images.

The pieces were "very simple, open-ended, ambiguous,” says Gibson. “They were also somewhat integrated with the environment — the street, the road markings — giving them an almost subliminal quality.” Gibson adds, “I think my intention was to create a language that would function as a form of satire, accentuating the absurdity inherent to certain aspects of urban living, urban space, [and] public policy.” But evidently something got lost in translation: Montreal police arrested Gibson on November 29 last year and charged him with 51 counts of mischief, the charges carrying maximum penalties ranging from $200 to $5,000.

What began as subtle, but benign subversion turns out to pose broad political questions about the rampant corporatization of the public realm (which continues to emerge in unsuspecting places):

As Gibson notes, “We aggressively pursue graffiti writers for scrawling their names on a wall across from a massive backlit billboard advertising Big Macs.” Despite the claims of police that the Roadsworth images are a threat to public safety, Gibson argues that what they actually threaten is the corporate monopoly on public space.

Fortunately, the charges against Gibson were dropped earlier this week. Here are some examples of his work (tons of others here), which all display a great affection and concern for Montreal and how its residents live. This is the kind of stuff that makes everyday life more vivid; it creates moments of uniqueness out of otherwise banal stuff. Cities need this kind of love.

 

Gibson's experience makes me wonder which is worse/better: for street art and various other culture-jamming actions to be kept underground by laws, or formally encouraged? (Gibson was hired by the city to create artwork as part of his "punishment.") I suppose it begins by simply spreading information, and letting everyone connect the dots for themselves.

How do planners and urban designers react to this? How do you spur serendipity? A playful urban condition that benefits everyone?

Casually Flawless

Today's Salon takes us inside the world of Abercrombie & Fitch's headquarters outside of Columbus to interview the company's president, Mike Jeffries. Look at the way the architecture of this internally focused world aligns with brand identity, with its suggestions of outdoorsiness and youth:

If looks could kill, everyone here would be dead. Jeffries' employees are young, painfully attractive, and exceedingly eager, and they travel around the campus on playground scooters, stopping occasionally to chill out by the bonfire that burns most days in a pit at the center of campus. The outdoorsy, summer-camp feel of the place is accentuated by a treehouse conference room, barnlike building and sheds with gridded windows, and a plethora of wooden decks and porches. But the campus also feels oddly urban -- and, at times, stark and unwelcoming. The pallid, neo-industrial two-story buildings are built around a winding cement road, reminding employees that this is a workplace, after all.

Jeffries has turned his singular focus on branding inward, re-creating himself in the image of the brand's ideal customer:

His biggest obsession, though, is realizing his singular vision of idealized all-American youth. He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips. But while he can't turn back the clock, he can -- and has -- done the next best thing, creating a parallel universe of beauty and exclusivity where his attractions and obsessions have made him millions, shaped modern culture's concepts of gender, masculinity and physical beauty, and made over himself and the world in his image, leaving them both just a little more bizarre than he found them.

That is odd. But then I wonder about the greater connection between how we adorn ourselves--from clothing to facelifts--and how that resonates with how we configure our physical environment. Frank Lloyd Wright allegedly designed dresses for his clients' wives, so that they could coordinate better with the furnishings:

Wright did not aspire simply to design a house, but to create a complete environment, and he often dictated the details of the interior. He designed stained glass, fabrics, furniture, carpet and the accessories of the house. Legend has it that, in at least one case, he even designed the gowns of his client's wife.The controlling factor was seldom the wishes of the individual client, but Wright's belief that buildings stongly influence the people who inhabit them. He believed that "the architect is a molder of men, whether or not he consciously assumes the responsibility."

Below: the A&F headquarters, which won some AIA awards a few years ago (jury comments follow):

"The facility really epitomized the business trend of capturing their brand identity in their facilities," the jury remarked. "They also captured the rural Ohio farm style in their architecture, and they were very respectful of the natural environment."

Defying Death

What's wrong with modern architecture? Why has the "machine for living" left us wanting?

To begin, it has too many straight lines:

An internationally acclaimed, award-winning painter-turned-architectural-designer, Shusaku Arakawa brands typical modern Japan dwellings as lifeless and inhuman -- not to mention harmful. This is, he insists, partly because they feature too many straight lines and flat planes that do not exist in nature.

By contrast, Arakawa, who now bases himself in New York, advocates "architecture that defies death." How? By incorporating inconveniences and obstacles in his designs in order to bring people's sensory perception back to life -- or by helping them "externalize" themselves, as the 69-year-old artist describes it.

A case in point is Arakawa's latest work, "Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka in Memory of Helen Keller," in Mitaka, Tokyo. His work on a nine-unit condo there in the capital's western outskirts symbolizes what he terms his mission to create "an apparatus through which we bring our life closer to eternity."

Each of the condos for sale in this complex in a Tokyo suburb is round in shape, with spaces surrounding a kitchen in the middle. None of the rooms have doors.

The "study" has no place for a desk, let alone a flat work surface. Its light switch is mounted at ankle height, and the intercom is mounted at a 45 degree angle on the wall. Elsewhere in the unit the floors slope at a 20-degree angle, and resemble the surface of the moon.

The various ways the arrangement of the condo's parts play with expectations are meant to heighten the senses and force a dialogue on how people interact with their surroundings. Straight lines and right angles are deadening and constitute a kind of physical and mental barrier; through conscious reversal of this dull "destiny," people will live more consciously, Arakawa says.

New Prefab Neighbors

As is probably obvious, I am very interested in the exploding prospects of prefab home design. The twin impulses of economy and flexibility that drive prefab are both ethical and inspiring. (These are in fact classically Modern values that have largely eluded designers for the last century.) It seems there is reason to believe that prefab will become a larger part of the housing market in the near future as construction materials continue to get scarcer and more expensive.

A high degree of flexibility and adaptability in design--from furniture to architecture--ideally engenders and supports the development of personal and collective identity; this "do it yourself" ethos encourages people to think about how they live, and adopt active roles in configuring their surroundings. That's interesting. Design, at its most democratic and empowering, ought to be able support and further our individual and collective searches for learning and self-definition.

An entire neighborhood of such homes--a new experimental community--is also interesting, both designwise and economically.

Developer Nathan Wieler has broken ground on Henley, a new neighborhood outside of Raleigh-Durham that is reserved exclusively for the construction of prefabricated housing. Several local NC firms are designing homes for Henley. In addition, the neighborhood will feature the first-ever built versions of Ralph Rapson's Greenbelt House, a concept Rapson originally devised in the 1940s.

Henley is the home of the Dwell Home (below). Its construction was sponsored by the magazine by the same name. While detractors cite the high initial costs of the Dwell Home's construction as evidence of its infeasibility, I am still intrigued by the prospect of entire new neighborhoods set aside for experiments in modern architecture. Wieler and his company have plans for other communities in Raleigh-Durham in addition to Henley, which only reinforces the image of Raleigh-Durham as an inventive place.

The impulse to build an enclave of unusual dwellings in harmony with a spectacular natural setting has a variety of precedents, all with various degrees of social engineering embedded. An aging Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired neighborhood in Columbus showcases examples of Usonian-inspired design, while a new neighborhood near St. Paul marries a particular interpretation of local vernacular with a site-specific meadow ecosystem.

Future Context

This is a very smart article, written by John King, the San Francisco Chronicle's architectural critic, about the role of contextualism in design:

Who can quibble with the idea that buildings should be good neighbors and defer to the past? Right?

But here's the thing about theories: At some point you can judge the results, not just the intent. And even if you're a fan of the contextual approach -- which I am -- it has been around long enough for us to see that looking backward isn't enough. In an age where cities and suburbs are in a constant state of flux, it makes no sense to think that architecture alone is static -- a two-dimensional backdrop to daily life.

Whats the secret? How can something be contextual without "matching" its surroundings? Here, King describes a stealthy steel-and-glass box that was inserted into a setting of masonry buildings and--lo and behold!--the result is not disastrous:

The size of the structure serves as a transition between the stocky office building and the low garage, just as the spacious loft openings are reminiscent of the large windows carved into old factory buildings to let in light. The curving steel with its vertical seams is a departure, to be sure, but it lets you appreciate the right-angled order of what's nearby.

The cool poise of 85 Natoma also accents the heft of the aged masonry around it. As different as these buildings look side by side, they complement each other.

One other salient point:

Besides being architecturally stagnant, there's another danger when "contextualism" becomes nothing more than an exercise in painting by numbers. What gets ignored is the fact that the context itself keeps changing.

Design has this weird relationship with time that designers are getting better at recognizing. That is, physical, social, and economic context of a building are constantly in flux, and not static, as architectural drawings would suggest. As King points out, the answer is not always to present a jarring, metallic answer to pre-existing context, but consideration of a project in four dimensions is absolutely essential--because things will inevitably change, and the architect won't (shouldn't) be around to decide how a place evolves. 

American Sameness

Two recent, intriguing articles (spotted here) highlight tensions between local and global notions of place: one through urban design and development, and the other through consumption choices.

One article describes large-scale plans to spruce up the downtown area of Orlando with new urban design moves and an injection of density:

The current project, now known simply as "400 North Orange," is slated for the block bounded by Orange Avenue, Livingston Street, Amelia Street and the railroad tracks. City officials got a look at architectural renderings of the project for the first time Tuesday. It would feature three glass-skinned office buildings, two of them atop a sprawling, 10-story parking garage. A fourth building would feature 11 floors of hotel space below another 21 floors of condominium units. All of it would face an open plaza envisioned as a local version of Manhattan's Bryant Park, which is behind the New York Public Library.

A large grassy area flanked by a jumbo television screen on one side and a fountain on the other, the Orlando plaza could host picnickers, fashion shows or outdoor movies, developers said. A similar garden area would top the garage. Open space would make up about 2 acres of the 5.6-acre site.

"We intend for this to be the Rockefeller Center of Orlando," project manager Mark Rieker said.

"Downtown" to car-friendly and sprawling, improbable places like Orlando has, up to this point, always been somewhat of an anachronism, so it is interesting to see the amount of work being done to retrofit the city with a central core more befitting older, more traditional cities. Most of Orlando's vitality has traditionally happened along its southern edge, closer to Disneyworld and other tourist attractions--but perhaps that focus is shifting as the city continues to grow. Orlando is a city searching for a different identity, one that resonates globally and prescribes a different lifestyle. Obviously, New York is our principal model for urbanity, but how does that translate to central Florida?

Meanwhile, this article about consumer choice in Indianapolis's outer fringes evidences a common phenomenon--that of an ongoing battle between chains and local retailers. The flip side of being plugged in to a globalized lifestyle is that patronizing local businesses (or not) becomes an ever more political proposition:

That’s really my point. We need to vote for the independence, for the distinctiveness, for the hands-on qualities that locally owned businesses give us with our spending in the years to come. I dread a day that is nearly already here, a day when you can wake up in any suburban area in any city in the United States and have no clue where you are: Everything looks the same. An O’Charley’s there, a PetSmart here, a Bed Bath and Beyond on the corner.

But beyond the disgusting aspects of an American sameness, it’s simply smart money to invest in local businesses — in real people, in your real neighbors — instead of putting your hard-earned dollars into a corporate black hole that sucks it right off to Arkansas or California or New York. Invest in our community. Invest in a future.

Consumer choice, and the relative amount of it, has massive implications at an urban scale. After all, what happens when the outskirts of Indy are indistinguishable from, say, that of Atlanta? When everywhere becomes a clone town? The economics of place are directly tied to issues of identity: the one the place currently has, and the one that its residents wish it had.

Long Island, Dire Straits

Long Island, home to some 2.8 million people, is in serious trouble:

Long Island, where post-World War II suburbia was born, is in a midlife crisis and battling some disturbing social and economic trends that provide a window into issues that suburbs around the nation may face, according to a 15-month study sponsored by a nonprofit group.

Average pay from Long Island employers has dropped in recent years, little land is left to develop, taxes are high, cars are multiplying faster than people, commuting times are longer and people are being priced out of the housing market, the report said. And an increasing minority population is coinciding with persistent segregation.

Perhaps most striking is that a region long synonymous with families and children is losing part of its younger generation, and the median age of residents is steadily rising. In the 1990's, the number of people age 18 to 34 shrank by 143,184, or 20 percent, in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the census showed.

Not since the development of Levittown made Long Island synonymous with postwar suburban optimism has the island faced such shifts in economics and population:

Over half of Long Island residents report having difficulty paying their monthly housing costs, a figure that has climbed steadily over the past three years and is being felt increasingly by the average middle-income Long Islander. The percentage of residents who said they were very likely to move in the next five years increased from 27% last year to 32% in this poll, a significant increase for a one year period. Among younger people aged 18-34, 46% report being very likely to move as compared to only 40% last year. The most dramatic increase occurred among those aged 50 -64, with 37% saying they are very likely to leave as compared to last year’s survey when only 30% indicated that they were likely to leave.

Today's NYTimes reports on local efforts to breathe urban vitality into Long Island's commercial districts while somehow preserving its suburban character:

Mr. Suozzi, for instance, does not like to call what he has in mind a "downtown."

"We don't want to become urban," he said in an interview. "We don't want it to be called post-suburban either, or new urban, or whatever they are calling it in other places. We call it the new suburbia." Naming things being the first order of any reimagining, Mr. Suozzi even refers to the area by a different name from the one it has had, the Hub, since development there was first proposed by a previous county executive, Thomas S. Gulotta.

"We call it Nassau Centre now, and make sure you spell it right," Mr. Suozzi said.

This is exactly the kind of tension older suburbs around the country face. I'm curious to see how "keeping it suburban" works exactly in the face of changing habits and tastes. Once a place's identity is fixed, it's dead--watch what's "suburban" get reinvented in the same unexpected ways that all these formerly forlorn city neighborhoods are. There's no reason to believe some of the folks populating idealized, ironic versions of city neighborhoods won't want idealized, ironic versions of suburbia someday. With the sudden popularity of ranch-style homes from the 60's and 70's, isn't this inevitable? Anyone else interested in critically reimagining the split-level?

For the meantime: with experiences like these, no wonder suburbs lose:

Once settled, Ms. Hillen, a stay-at-home mother, embarked on a fruitless hunt for companionship. "Out there, you have to work at being with people," she said. "In a year, I got one play date for my kid. We joined the Newcomers Club, and the day we put our house on the market, they finally called. You'd go to the library for a reading and there would be no one there." She added, "You're a lonely, desperate housewife with nothing to do."

Granted, the NYTimes indulges this line of thinking quite a bit. But still!

Portrait of Place

Stream of consciousness for the weekend:

I still find myself thinking about this insightful November conversation between a Guardian reporter and architect Renzo Piano. City of Sound delineates several of Piano's larger points, specifically regarding city form, the public realm, and sense of place:

The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians . . . They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.

Piano's point about the weight we give to different locations in a city is a provocative one--that a failure of French city planning was trusting an idea of static conditions in the banlieue, when the reality of these neighborhoods and communities (as with everywhere) is shifting and tumultous. While Piano, a Parisian himself, discusses these ideas with Paris specifically in mind, they have broader significance and bear consideration elsewhere.

What is the relationship between center and edge? Are these things, and how we think about them, static? What is the relationship of these conditions going to be when, because of inevitable change, these places are neither edge nor center any longer? What does the maturation of the edges of anywhere these days look like, anyway?

France's politicians have failed to understand that for a community to work, it cannot be a "ghetto"; it must be a place in which people work, and sleep, and socialise and, most importantly, "merge" in some way. He says ghettoes are "against the idea of a city. Cities are a place of tolerance, by definition, where difference must merge. It's tragically predictable, what happened, and it will probably happen again if something isn't done. It is also because of the government; these people don't understand the important of tolerance." He is not naive enough to believe that his field of endeavour can fix this. But does he believe that architecture can help build that tolerance? "Architecture in some way has the duty to suggest behaviour. In some way. Places are the portrait of communities, and if the place is impossible, the community becomes impossible.

An earlier portion of the interview deals with how Piano's upbringing in Genoa has threaded itself through his career and projects, so that in a sense his actions and ideas result from life in Genoa and Paris. We can read Piano's biography through his work--a childhood near the harbor and a fascination with boats adds up to an ongoing interest in "lightness," for example. This works at the scale of the city and the community as well--the physical forms of a place offer biographical details about a community's sense of itself.

Part of Piano's success as an architect seems to be how he works with context; the Centre Pompidou (his auspicious debut as a designer, along with Richard Rodgers) is to me like a supercharged relation to context, a sort of "context bomb" in the middle of the Marais that forces it into sharp relief through its scale, material, and form. Its empty piazza is one of the most iconic and vibrant open spaces in what is already a city with a great public realm. A visitor is startled by how the space urges contemplation of both building and neighborhood, of art and city...of things "merging". (There's much more I could say about the Pompidou...but I digress.)

Anyway, in the interview Piano draws a vital distinction between a plaza and a piazza:

"A piazza is not a plaza," fumes Piano. "The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand." A space without function allows one to be "in the moment", he says, and to counter what he sees as a major flaw in modern life - the habit of interpreting all experience in the light of achievement, as a means to an end. We should, he thinks, learn to lighten up, and the creation of empty, purposeless spaces within cities might encourage that. "You don't have to struggle to give function to every single corner. You can just wait and see and enjoy."

It strikes me that quality and identity of space and place are ever more crucial issues for architecture now. What does "here" mean? And "us"? If globalization erodes regional difference down to the point where the DNA of "local" and "community" are altered beyond recognition, what happens to design? When good design ends with endless commodification, what happens to "empty, purposeless spaces"?

These are rhetorical questions, but it seems responses to this issue of spatial identity or "portrait of place" exist across a broad spectrum, in everything from the design of custom wallpaper (also here! wow!) to architecture to the emergence of Google Maps and Yellow Arrow. Pattern is inscribed on top of pattern; information is layered; surfaces acquire increasing texture. (below, a library by Herzog & de Meuron in Eberswalde, Germany. plus a proposal for wrapping trolleys in Toronto. via)

 

Here is a radio show about the "geo-spatial web," where the digital realm has begun to reorganize and augment the physical world:

Already it means online maps loaded with information about the physical world, and someday soon, that physical world itself will be tagged and teeming with data for the asking: What is that building? Where is my dog? Who is that man?

Talk of the Nation

Why are cities where they are?

Why is Atlanta where it is? Or Phoenix? Or Mason City, Iowa? And what happens when a city or town's original justification disappears? Can it survive?

Listen. (from January 4th's edition of Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio).