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.

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.

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.

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.