Brand Avenue

Home Ground

An insightful recent essay by Natalia Ilyin in Metropolis explores ideas of home and mobility, identity and belonging:

I have moved from state to state and country to country 12 times in my life, with many a change of apartment or house in-between. Like most Americans, I have never stood on the ground where my great-grandparents once stood. And as the years go by, I find myself asking, What does it feel like to stand on that ground? What does it feel like to come from somewhere? Where’s home?

Is home a place? Can it be more than one place? Is it a sensibility, an emotion? Is it sets of things unique to individuals and groups? Is home other people? Is it music? Language? Time? Image? 

I'll quote liberally here, because I think the essay asks good questions, and--on a personal note--not just because they resonate with me:

Where’s home? There’s the quick answer we all give—San Francisco!—but what’s your deep answer? Where is the stake that marks home ground? And if you cannot find that stake, how do you move out from nowhere?...We do what we can. To make up for my lack of ties to the land, I spend a lot of energy on people. But because I have fewer relationships than a person who lives where his grandparents lived, since I’m not bonded to a ground, I wind tighter to those dear to me. It’s good to have close bonds, but it’s not necessarily good to expect people to take up the slack left by the lack of a center....

We’re not migrating swallows or trail-bound Apache: we take random routes. We stay for a while. We don’t come back. We may admire Wen­dell Berry and nod our heads wisely over his elegant prose, but we don’t have a family farm, we have no ties to the land—we have a mortgage on a house in a town where we’ve lived for a few years....

What is the emotional toll of having no place to call home? What is the psychic result of moving for the company every three years? What is the price of a Best Buy and Staples at every 40-mile interval along the interstate? Of suburban houses that could as easily be in North Carolina as in California?

Put more optimistically, I suppose home could be everywhere, in a sense. But regardless the essay offers plenty to chew on, especially for those who purport to make places for a living.

Along these lines, check out the clever place finder function within the website of Richard Florida's brilliant new book, Who's Your City?, which I'll review here more fully soon. If nothing else, it quantifies one's own personal perceptions of place, and is a smart way to gather data about collective buzz as well, I would imagine. Unsurprisingly, I discover upon taking the quiz that I should probably leave the city in which I currently live.

360 Degree Experience

To follow up on recent looks at the retail environments of both Starbucks and Nau, here's an article from BusinessWeek underlining the significance of "designing for the complete experience," and in effect demarcating fertile territory between architecture and marketing:

There is still one frontier that remains wide open: experience innovation. This is the only type of business innovation that is not imitable, nor can it be commoditized, because it is born from the specific needs and desires of your customers and is a unique expression of your company's DNA. Yet the design of an experience is often overlooked in the rush to market.

One need look no further than a NYT article from Wednesday's paper about the re-branding of the Le Méridien hotel chain (hotel design covered here earlier; travel being an obvious and rich place to look for "experience innovation") to see how this latter-day gesamtkunstwerk approach draws on broad, disparate cultural influences to become something in excess of architecture or event-planning:

A “cultural curator,” Jérôme Sans, founder of Paris’s exhibition space Palais de Tokyo, has been retained by the hotel to oversee a range of amenities, including creating programs with six institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Mr. Sans is also developing in-house amenities like business breakfast menus by the celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten; specialty Illy coffee drinks; and a Méridien scent, LM01, by the French perfume company Le Labo.

What of the "cultural curator" role described above? Wouldn't it be interesting if architects and even planners did more of the same? Perhaps there's some poetry lost in the segregation of responsibilities.

In addition to perfume and coffee, the hotel chain has commissioned the composition of a "distinct sound" for its elevators, lobby and rooms. In lieu of a chocolate on the pillow at night, hotel staff leave a book of fairy tales instead.

“We’re trying to create a chic culture of discovery,” said Eva Ziegler, senior vice president for Le Méridien brand, “where the sophistication of art, architecture, and cuisine are available to travelers in a way that is subtle yet refined.”

As Sans points out in an article in the IHT from last fall, "Culture is not just deluxe. For once, companies understand that dealing with culture is a key issue, and it needn't be intimidating."

In other words, focusing on user experience, which naturally has cultural dimensions, is not additive to the design process. Big and little touches, such as the design of a hotel's key cards, are all part of a whole:

Key cards will be decorated with artwork, and the hotel hopes that people will collect them. Guests will also get separate cards with information about exhibits at nearby cultural institutions that are partners of Le Méridien.

Above, one of Le Méridien's new key card designs.

I mention these things because I think they're fascinating; but also because I think there's an interesting possible overlap for architects and even planners here. There is the odd architecture firm that already does things like event planning or brand identity, and plenty of architects design furniture, but how many do perfume, or oversee menu choices? Examples of broader and more (for lack of better terms) explicitly experiential approaches to design in the planning and architecture world seem quite rare. Maybe you know of some.