MoMI as a Future House

The first time I saw this futuristic house in a commercial for New Jersey lottery's "Cash 4 Life," I thought it looked familiar:


Turns out it's the highly photogenic Museum of the Moving Image expansion in Astoria, Queens, designed by Thomas Leeser:

[Photo: Elizabeth Felicella | Image source]

Specifically it's the cafe at the back of the lobby, which doubles as an event space:

[Photo:Wendy Moger-Bross/Museum of the Moving Image | Image source]

And in the land of commercials it doubles as a house in the not-too-distant future:

Xarelto's Architecture Equation

Watching this commercial for prescription drug Xarelto earlier today I couldn't help notice that...


A visit to a Mario Botta building (Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina)

+


Seeing a model of the Roman Coliseum in one of its galleries

+


Popping some Xarelto

=


A trip to see the Coliseum in person (well, through a car window, at least).



Thank you, Xarelto! (and Mr. Botta and Mr. Bechtler)

Lost the perk-in in your gherkin?

Here is a newspaper ad—no comment necessary—spotted at Dezeen that is worth filing in my "architectural advertising" posts.

Look Like an Architect with Superfocus

While waiting for my bagel this morning, the TV behind the cash register had a commercial for Superfocus, in which Joel Grey, Penn Jillette, and others were hawking glasses that resemble what architects were wearing half a century ago. Lo and behold, the Icon Collection Frames go by the names Bauhuas and Corbu. Some screenshots and descriptions from their website.

Named Bauhaus in appreciation of the iconic movement created by design master Walter Gropius in Weimar in the 1920s.

The Bauhaus has been a profound worldwide influence in art, architecture, graphic design, and last but not least, product design.

We believe that Dr. Gropius would have approved of the sleek, utilitarian look of these Superfocus glasses.

We proudly call this style Corbu. Named after Le Corbusier, one of the great pioneers of modern architecture, whose signature look was his famous, round, dark-rimmed glasses, with the temples centered on the circular rims. Look familiar?

It looks the only difference between the two frames (besides the optional finishes) is the where the arm connects to the rim. So if you pick up one of these "superframes," don't be surprised if people mistake you for Gropius when you're wearing Corbu, or vice versa.

Taking Pride in Madison Square Garden

I must admit I was baffled upon seeing this ad for Zurich Service Corporation on the back page of The Atlantic.



After all, Madison Square Garden is the increasingly unloved replacement for the much loved (often nostalgically) Penn Station, which was demolished in the mid-1960s to make way for the circular sports arena. Recently even, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman has called for moving the Garden, saying that the "present arena is a flimsy, aging eyesore." For his predecessor, Nicolai Ouroussoff, it was tops on a 2008 list of candidates for demolition in which he called the Garden "cramped and decrepit."

Most people hate the Garden for what it did to the remains of Penn Station underneath it -- "one of the city’s most dehumanizing spaces: a warren of cramped corridors and waiting areas buried under the monstrous drum of the Garden", again Ouroussoff. The Garden may be an eyesore, but remove if from atop one of the busiest transit hubs in the world (Penn Station is home to Amtrak, Long Island Railroad, New Jersey Transit and two MTA subway lines) and its negative qualities drop significantly.

Nevertheless I'm still baffled that an "insurance-based financial services provider" would take pride in the construction of Madison Square Garden at time when people seem to loathe it more than ever. Perhaps being located in Europe they have a hard time seeing the building for what it means to many people in New York City and the United States.

Charles Renfro, J.Crew-Wearing Architect

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed I have a thing for the intersection of architecture and advertising, be it iconic buildings used as a backdrop for a product, clothiers using the profession for style "cred," or an architect hawking merchandise. The last two converge in a J.Crew ad I noticed today on the inside cover of February's Fast Company:



Pushing the Ludlow Suit, the ad features six gents sporting six variations on the "bespoke-inspired" suit. Two are restauranteurs, one is a journalist/activist, one is a business analyst, one is a creative director, and one is an architect, Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Given the firm where he is partner, his name is fairly well known with architects, but not his mug. This ad will certainly change that, while also making people wonder what his sock drawer looks like.



Each of this six stylish professionals has their own idiosyncratic way of personalizing the J.Crew suit. Renfro has those socks; the creative director ditches socks altogether; one restauranteur shows off a wallet chain; you get the idea. Architecture, or any other profession, does not prevail over others. Instead five are used to cover a larger stylistic and professional spectrum, leaving out only jobs like caddy, dishwasher, and bookstore clerk (all hats I donned before architect), where bespoke-inspired fashion just isn't that important.

AAA: Architecture Advertising Automobiles

Last year I posted about some advertising in Architectural Digest that used architects and architecture to sell cars. Well the other day I was flipping through a travel magazine and was surprised to see an ad for Buick Lacrosse using the America's Cup Building in Valencia, Spain by David Chipperfield Architects. In my previous post I focused on how Lexus used the architect's name (Richard Meier) more than his architecture for their purposes; in effect the architect was promoting the car. But for Buick it is the image of the building that matters; the architect in name or personality is nowhere to be found outside the architecture.


[Click image for larger view | image source]

Remembering other advertisements with cars using architecture as a backdrop (I blogged five years ago about VW and OMA's Seattle Public Library), I think the America's Cup Building works similarly here: it does a better job of distinguishing a car from its peers than the car does itself. Given that cars increasingly look like each other and buildings do the opposite and veer greatly in form and image from their contemporaries, this makes sense. In Buick's case, the stacked horizontality of the building and the photo's strong perspective enable the car and its rounded lines to stand out and be seen as something unique. (I'm assuming it's a photograph because the building is complete, but the high level of polish of the images makes me wonder if it's a rendering). It's like a zig-zag with the building "going" one way (to the left) and the car the other way.

But beyond a two-dimensional graphic composition on the page or screen, I'm having a hard time seeing how architecture and automobiles relate in this and other ads. I think, like anything, architecture is seen as just another commodity and buildings are appreciated for its imagery more than its other traits (function, relationship to place, social role, etc.). Chipperfield's building is not a totally uninspired choice, but it does veer from the curvilinear and dynamic shapes of Gehry, OMA, and Morphosis, whose buildings are more in line with the formal characteristic of today's cars.

Architects Hawking Cars

Flipping through October's Architectural Digest, "The Architecture Issue," a couple advertisements stood out, each using architecture and architects to sell cars.

The first is a two-page spread for Lexus, its HS Hybrid sitting in front of a Richard Meier sketch of his "much-anticipated Italcementi Innovation and Technology Central Laboratory" in northern Italy. The fairly ho-hum sketch is accompanied by text that boasts the lab "will be built of TX Active concrete that will 'eat' smog and significantly reduce pollution caused by car emissions and industrial activities." Not surprisingly the pollution-mitigating cement was developed by Italcementi and tried out on Meier's Jubilee Church in Rome. The ad's text further states that the other features of Meier's building (insulated low-e glass, geothermal, solar energy systems) will supposedly "provide close to total energy self-sufficiency."



The second ad is one of those "special advertising sections" laid out like a magazine feature, fooling us into reading the content as if it didn't exist solely to sell a product. Across four pages the reader is shown the winners of Maserati's 2009 "nationwide call for entries of garages in which a Maserati might feel at home." Most of the photos are of the existing garage winner, Holger Schubert of Archisis (the other winner, in the conceptual category is shown in the gray box at bottom right). The 1,200sf (111sm) garage is the first of five for the L.A. architect's canyonside residence; it literally looks like a home for the car. A bridge gives access to the glass-walled garage. Features inside include radiant concrete floors, mechanically operated window screens, a library with homasote walls, some designer furniture and a ramp that raises six inches to allow Schubert to pull out of the garage without starting the engine. The top-right image shows that not only does the architect give the car a view he also gives onlookers a view of his car.



That architecture and architects are being used to sell cars does not surprise me; it is something I documented in 2005. Nor am I taken aback that it is done in these manners. Design and its relationships to the environment, in the first case, and luxury, in the second, are shared by both the building and car industries. And, while further differences between the two ads include the celebrity stature of one architect and the relative lack of name recognition of the other, they share a certain optimism about the future of architecture and cars. Sustainability, creativity and a drive (pardon the pun) to improve our situation links these two realms. Now if only architects could be paired up in advertising with bicycles or public transportation.

Hi, I'm Lise. Buy this phone.

Flipping through a lifestyle magazine in a waiting room last week, I couldn't help but stop my speedy flip through the rag on an ad for Blackberry featuring Asymptote's Lise Anne Couture. While easily more photogenic than co-principal Hani Rashid, nevertheless I was quite shocked to see an architect hawking expensive mobile electronics. I was also surprised that a more well-known architect didn't get the job. But when one pictures the most famous woman architect, Zaha Hadid, it's easy to see the shallow, surface-oriented minds of the advertisers easily making that decision, particularly with the fact that advertising isn't limited to the page these days, but also includes the requisite sound + video.

Blogging Ads

In my ongoing series-that's-not-a-series of posts on the Blog-o-sphere, I decided to look at advertising after seeing a glut of it on a blog that shall remain nameless. The below diagram is my overlay of four types of content on a single post from that blog (from dark to light): blog post, blog-related information (blog title, feeds, internal links), external links, and advertising (google ads, books, etc.). Without measuring the exact areas, and ignoring the white space, I'd guess the post itself is 10% of the content, blog-related is 20%, external links another 20%, and advertising the remaining 40%.

What makes the majority of a page advertising is not the fact that blogs are money-making undertakings -- as that fact is far from true, unless you're Treehugger -- but that advertising now is as easy as blogging itself. Google makes it especially easy to incorporate their AdSense into a page, be it in the sidebar, header, footer, or within a post itself. Amazon makes their Associates program easier and more varied all the time. These are two of just many ways people are advertising on their blogs.



Of course, I'm guessing that any revenue from ads is tied to traffic, though I would wonder if people really want to visit a site that's almost half advertising. Unfortunately, with this ease of advertising and a view of blogging as another way to make money, the glut of advertising is rather widespread. With the advent of DSL and cable modems, some advertising (most apparent on the sites of newspapers) now contains animation or video, making the content recede that much more into the background.

As my page contains advertising in the far-right sidebar, I'd be a hypocrite to push for removing ads entirely from blogs. Instead I'd recommend advertising that respects the content by not crowding it, not distracting from it via moving images, and not confusing readers as to what's content and what's a sales pitch. Of course, these recommendations go against the current trends of online advertising and in that case is a pipe-dream, though a somewhat realistic one at that.

Banana Architects

A few weeks ago I heard about Banana Republic's new advertising campaign that features "architects at work." I have yet to come across their print ads, but the other day I saw these displays at their Rockefeller Center store.



Gawker interviewed an architect about the portrayal of architects in these ads. "Frankie" said, "in my experience no architects dress like that - the Liebeskind [sic] eyeglasses and black turtleneck/blazer, German expressionist style is still the bottom line at most nyc offices. Most people are executing variations on this basic Sprockets-y theme."

To me, it doesn't really seem to matter which profession Banana Republic uses as a backdrop (or in the case of the windows "frontdrop") for their M.O.R. clothes, as long as it appeals or relates to their target demographic. It is interesting, though, how the symbols of architecture -- some mythic, some anachronistic -- are used to connote who is wearing them; take away these objects and it could be practically anybody or, to paraphrase Frankie, anybody but architects.

"...And I Approved This Ad"

Looks like Ralph Johnson of Perkins + Will is looking to join the ranks of celebrity architects, alongside Daniel Libeskind and Richard Meier with Signature Place in St. Petersburg, Florida. Or is he already there?



Like David Childs, Johnson's role as a lead designer at a large corporate firm actually precludes him from being seen like Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and other "singular voices" of celebrity in contemporary architecture. Though unlike David Childs, Johnson is a very capable designer who produces excellent buildings of different types and scales.



Thanks to Jeff S. for the head's up.

In the Name of $

The always wonderful Things Magazine posted today about billboard advertising, spurred by the clever one below for a suntan lotion.



While I'm often dismayed by the fact so much creative effort is expended on something so fleeting as the always-reinventing-itself-to-give-the-consumer-something-new world of advertising, this billboard is reminiscent of a mural along the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago titled Shadow Mural, commissioned by The Catholic Charities of Chicago. The mural is made from hundreds of uniquely-shaped metal strips cantilevered from structural panels to depict Jesus washing the feet of the disciples flanked by the heads of St. Vincent DePaul and Frederick Ozanam, the founder of the St. Vincent DePaul Society.



Things goes on to mention Delete!, "which stripped out all extraneous white noise from advertising in a single street in Vienna." A few years before Delete!, Pasi Kolhonen investigated the inverse, removing the context and leaving the advertising in photographs of the streets of Helsinki.

So we have a couple installations/proposals that deal with the pervasive overtaking of our visual landscape (particularly in cities) by advertising and two types of advertising that recognize this and respond with creative and comparatively subdued expressions. It's like an urban-scale tug-of-war without an end in sight. As long as there's something to sell (commercially or religiously), there will be advertising of some form, and as long as people look at billboards, advertisers will use them. Unfortunately, when advertisers come up with clever responses like this, it's hard not to look.

CHAnge?

Yesterday I got wind of an anonymous web page that criticizes the Chicago Housing Authority's current situation by taking aim at the city organization's latest ad campaign, "This is CHAnge". The group that also goes by the name Chicago Housing Authority claims that "This PR campaign, authored by the advertising giant Leo Burnett...[resulted] in a new brand identity: CHAnge," reflecting actual conditions: "Including massive organizational restructuring within CHA and the tearing down of all high-rise public housing buildings...Unfortunately, the priorities of CHA haven't changed at all, and public housing residents are still at the bottom of the list."



The image at left shows the real CHA's ad campaign, a South Side attorney quoted as saying, "Public housing is coming to a point I hoped it would - full circle." Alternately the fake CHA includes the line "Are tourists more important than the poor?" above a mug of the Mayor and a photo of Millennium Park's "bean". According to CHAos's site, poster size ads were installed in JC Decaux bus stops and other CTA locations around the city on May 27, all but one removed by noon that day.

While I find the play on the CHA's ad campaign clever and a bit humorous (they even copy the CHA's own web page almost to the letter, making it difficult for me to keep track of each, perhaps a dangerous move that may spell disaster for this anonymous page), I can't really find the effort having any significant impact or leading to any real CHAnge. But the CHAos web page also includes information on the CHA's latest "Plan for Transformation", as well as Resources and Resident Voices, pages with information that may at least educate people on the history and current state of public housing and eventually lead to worthwhile change.

Update 06.10: The Chicago Reader has a feature on CHA's mock advertising (in PDF format).

Advertising Architecture

It seems like architecture is taking a more prominent role in advertising these days. Specifically sexy, photogenic architecture by the likes of Frank Gehry, Morphosis, or Rem Koolhaas. And specifically car commercials, where the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Caltrans HQ, or the Seattle Public Library - by these architects, respectively - sit in the background as this year's model zips by in the foreground.



This above print ad for Volkswagen is a good example, especially given that advertisers strive for consistency across different media (TV, print, internet, radio, etc) in their ad campaigns to create an image in the consumer's mind. In terms of print area, the car that's being "sold" takes up less room in the ad than OMA's Public Library in Seattle (in fact, it takes up less area than the pavement or the people's silhouettes, for that matter, showing that these days quantity isn't as important as quality, or more specifically mood). Basically VW is taking a trendy piece of architecture and using it to add appeal to what looks like a run-of-the-mill, four-door sedan. Take the building out and what do you have? A car that looks like many other cars on the market these days. The architecture helps to create an identity for the car with the consumer.

I'm sure this isn't a new thing, but the more I see TV commercials of cars whizzing by the latest curvaceous or jagged building, the more these commercials seem the same, to the point where the distinction or identity that the advertisers are aiming for isn't working anymore.

kyocera, Go Away.

Earlier today when I took a train into the Loop I looked down after exiting through the turnstiles to see a large, colored circle on the floor with the words "kyocera" inside. I've never seen the word before, but I figured it was an advertisement for some product. Mainly I was wondering to what extent is the CTA willing to go for advertising, and is advertising going to help avoid another fare increase, one that has been mentioned by the CTA, even though earlier this year the fare climbed to $1.75 with a $.25 transfer, the same price as New York City which has free transfers on a $2.00 fare.

Later, as I sat on the "L" platform outside the James Thompson Center, I looked up and across the tracks to see billboard after billboard of kyocera ads. Typically advertising on train platforms is limited to designated displays, the ads rotating every month or so. So it was quite a surprise to see about twenty ads extending to the left and the right of the picture below:



Now, I don't know how recently this happened, or if this is a new trend, or if this is only a special advertising campaign for some new-fangled phone, but I hope it doesn't become the norm. We have advertising on every new bus stop in the city, courtesy of JC Decaux, and have train cars and buses emblazoned with corporate logos; just what we need is more advertising on the CTA.

TV, Advertising and Buses

Safety Neal's post from Friday about the 10th Annual TV-Turnoff Week seemed to coincide wonderfully with a mention in the Chicago Reader this week about buses in suburban Chicago being outfitted with televisions. In a test program, two Pace buses have been equipped with three 15" monitors each, airing "informational programming to make transit riding more enjoyable." Of course advertising will be have a large amount of "airtime" in order to pay for the costs of buying, installing and maintaining the monitors. If successful the televisions will be installed in an additional 387 buses.

This move is reminiscent of other recent installations, primarily in elevators and cabs throughout Chicago, indicating that television is infiltrating every part of our lives, outside of work and sleep, though even those can co-exist with television's presence. Also, it seems to indicate that people are so busy that they need to catch the news, weather and sports while riding a cab to and from a meeting, or riding up to their offices. Regardless of the reasons for their presence in these locations - most likely due to advertising's willingness to find additional ways and places to influence us and the willingness of people to make money from this - the addition of televisions in buses seems as unnecessary as elevators and cabs, at least in my mind.

Continuing with the premise that advertising is driving these decisions, print ads have popped up in many Chicago neighborhoods where none existed before. Instead of in the form of billboards or banners hung from street lights, they're part of the new bus stops littered about the city. French outdoor advertising company J.C. Decaux won a bid to outfit the city with more than 2,000 bus shelters, designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern. Decaux's success in securing the contract in Chicago - and many other cities including Los Angeles and Vancouver - is due to its methods: install the shelters free of charge in exchange for advertising space on each. Once again advertisers are finding a way to increase their exposure and subsequently influence our spending choices, unfortunately at the expense of residential neighborhoods once free from advertising's presence.


A bus shelter two blocks from my apartment

My negative attitude towards the bus shelters would be different if the advertising was for local businesses, which it sometimes - though rarely - is, most likely due to high advertising rates. Instead we are subjected to ads for the latest prescription drugs or television programs, bringing right back around to television and its growing presence and negative effects (pdf link) on people.