BRANDSCAPES Architecture in the Experience Economy

Description

In the twenty-first century, we must learn to look at cities not as skylines but as brandscapes, and at buildings not as objects but as advertisements and destinations. In the experience economy, experience itself has become the product: we’re no longer consuming objects but sensations, even lifestyles. In the new environment of brandscapes, buildings are not about where we work and live but who we imagine ourselves to be. In Brandscapes, Anna Klingmann looks critically at the controversial practice of branding by examining its benefits, and considering the damage it may do.
Klingmann argues that architecture can use the concepts and methods of branding—not as a quick-and-easy selling tool for architects but as a strategic tool for economic and cultural transformation. Branding in architecture means the expression of identity, whether of an enterprise or a city; New York, Bilbao, and Shanghai have used architecture to enhance their images, generate economic growth, and elevate their positions in the global village. Klingmann looks at different kinds of brandscaping today, from Disneyland, Las Vegas, and Times Square—prototypes and case studies in branding—to Prada’s superstar-architect-designed shopping epicenters and the banalities of Niketown.
But beyond outlining the status quo, Klingmann also alerts us to the dangers of brandscapes. By favoring the creation of signature buildings over more comprehensive urban interventions and by severing their identity from the complexity of the social fabric, Klingmann argues, today’s brandscapes have, in many cases, resulted in a culture of the copy. As experiences become more and more commodified, and the global landscape progressively more homogenized, it falls to architects to infuse an ever more aseptic landscape with meaningful transformations.
How can architects use branding as a means to differentiate places from the inside out—and not, as current development practices seem to dictate, from the outside in? When architecture brings together ecology, economics, and social well-being to help people and places regain self-sufficiency, writes Klingmann, it can be a catalyst for cultural and economic transformation.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ARCHITECTURE IN THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY
EYES WHICH DO NOT SEE

• Liners: From Function to Experience
• Airplanes: From Hardware to Humanware
• Automobiles: From Standardization to Mass Customization

CHANGING THE CODE

• The Experience Economy
• Architecture as Experience
• The Brand
• Added Value

ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT ARCHITECTS

• Architecture with a Plot
• Living the Fully Branded Experience
• Literal Brandscapes
• Times Square and Potsdamer Platz
• NikeTown
• Phenomenal Brandscapes
• Third Street Promenade
• Evolution as “Flattened” Branded Landscape
• Jerde Partnership
• Reinventing the Communal Experience
• Inspiration

MARKETING WITHOUT MARKETERS

• The Choreography of Unpredictability
• The Accommodating Critical
• Nobrow
• Liquid Architecture
• Datascapes
• Time-Based Strategies
• Parametric Design
• SHoP
• The Legacy of Modernism

(M)ARKETING

• How Marketing Trumped (Modernist) Ideology
• Architecture as Product
• Understanding, Creating, Communicating

(M) ARCHITECTURE

• The Lessons of Las Vegas
• The Inverted Shed and the Inverted Duck
• Place Marketing
• The Illusion of Plans
• From Composition to Choreography
• From Object to Field
• From Axis to Path
• From Wall to Surface
• Pure Creation of the Mind
• The Legibility of Intention
• The Discontinuity of Stage and Backstage
• Drama + Diversity + Detail
• Addendum 1: Figural Regimes of Signification
• Addendum 2: The Parthenon

BEYOND BILBAO

• Architecture as a Catalyst for Urban Renewal
• Architecture as Brand Equity
• Architecture as Spectacle

ARCHITECTURE AS A BRAND

• Corporate Branding
• The Tension between Market and Place
• Corporate Architecture
• The Case of Vollkswagon and Ford
• From Impact to Contact
• Inspiration
• Urban Branding
• Think Locally, Act Globally
• Architecture as a Marketing Tool
• Concept Engineering
• Residential Branding
• Brandism (TM)
• The Brand Called “You”

TEN REMINDERS TO ARCHITECTS

• From Product to Brand
• From Need to Desire
• From Performance to Experience
• From Plan to Choreography
• From Program to Ambience
• From Impact to Contac
• From Function to Form
• From Commodity to Catalyst
• From Physical to Human Context
• From Object to Subject

BRIDGING THE GAP

Anna Klingmann, an architect and critic, is the founder and principal of KL!NGMANN, an agency for architecture and brand building in New York. Her work has been published in AD Magazine, Daidalos, Architectural Record, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and other periodicals.

378 pages