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Criticalista: branding
Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts

2014/01/26

Everything is Art

ARCO art fair, Madrid.
In September 2012, the fiscally and socially retrograde People's Party governing Spain raised the value-added tax on most items to 21%, breaking one of its most-repeated election promises and causing damage to a culture industry already battered by the economic crisis, not to mention impoverishing even further the "working" and middle class. Well this past week, not even one and half years later, the same government announced a reduction in the VAT charged on sales of works of art to 10%. 

This is obviously good news for art galleries, art collectors and white-collar criminals, for whom art collecting is an effective method for laundering cash. It is also encouraging news for the dying entertainment arts sector, which could be next if this policy is expanded to other arts. But is it good news for architecture? Well, building materials are still taxed at 21%, and there is no expectation that the "building art" might enjoy a similar reduction. The artisans who know the arts of plumbing, masonry, carpentry, welding, or "painting", must, in theory, still charge 21% VAT for their services. Other, more essential art-forms such as clothing, shoes, bicycles, or flatscreen television monitors are also still charged 21%, without likelihood of any break in sight.

But there's an easy solution for every Spanish retailer who wishes their goods would similarly be charged less VAT: rebrand their store as an "art gallery" instead. If art can be anything, then anything can be art, right?

Thus, a hardware store could simply become an art gallery specializing in "sculpture and installation art". In such a scenario, fluorescent lighting would be displayed on the floor, with a lot of space around it, and urinals would be displayed upside down. In the back shed where building materials are stocked, lumber would be strewn all about, as if a tornado had struck.

Similarly, a fashion retailer might merely add the word galería to their shopfront, since fashion boutiques look so much like art galleries already. HiFi shops would become sound-art galleries, while stores selling TVs would become galleries specializing in video-art.

Every month or so, new exhibitions would be installed, invitations would be sent out, and cava would be served to smartly dressed, highly discerning but vacuous snobs engaged in chit-chat and vicious gossip while completely ignoring the art as well as most of the rest of the people in the room.

Every single Spaniard would become a gallery-goer. Not just on Thursdays after work, but every weekday as well as Saturday. And if enough of us could actually land a steady job and start buying at these galleries, instead of just looking, then we might even become the country with the most art collections in the world.


2014/01/12

Power, Corruption and Architecture

Photo courtesy ElMundo.com
Transparency International released its annual report some weeks ago, and this year's corruption perception index, which ranks 177 countries from least to most corrupt, lists Spain as having dropped from position 30 to 40. In just one year.

Yes, you might well ask, but what does architecture have to do with all this?

Well, the biggest corruption scandal of them all, the Bárcenas affair (after Luís Bárcenas, the imprisoned former treasurer of the right-of-centre Partido Popular / PP, which governs Spain nationally as well as regionally in 11 of its 17 Autonomous Regions and locally in the majority of its municipalities), is about supposed illegal party funding during nearly two decades, mostly by construction companies and real-estate developers, who, in exchange for "donations" to the PP party, received favorable consideration by PP-led local or regional governments in the allocation of large public works contracts, or were granted favorable changes to land-use zoning bylaws when building private developments.

The whole racket began in 1990, but it went into high gear in 1998, when land law reforms passed by the Aznar-led PP majority government to facilitate zoning changes stimulated a huge boom in private real estate development that would last over a decade and that, upon bursting, would cause a disastrous economic crisis that is still on-going and seemingly never-ending. The construction boom's huge urban expansions required new infrastructure and public buildings, which in turn meant, of course, lots more opportunities to raise cash for the PP coffers. During the boom, the PP's slush fund was so large that Luís Bárcenas regularly handed out "bonuses" --envelopes containing large sums of cash-- to the party brass, including allegedly Mariano Rajoy, the current prime minister of Spain. Catalonia's ruling right-of-centre CiU party is embroiled in a similar scandal, the Palau case, in which contractors were allegedly systematically charged a 3% fee in the allocation of public works contracts.

Judges and journalists who have tried to investigate corruption networks, such as Judge Baltasar Garzón's probe into the "Gürtel" scandal or the Catalan digital newspaper Cafè amb Llet's uncovering of sleaze in Catalonia's public health system, have been either removed from office or sued for defamation, while a great many politicians accused of corruption are still in office. Corrupt politicians and royalty are defended, ironically, by none other than Spain's special "anti-corruption" prosecutor's office. Talk about impunity.

But what does architecture as distinct from construction have to do with all this?

The fact is that the real estate and public works boom of the 2000s coincides exactly with the period in which Spanish architecture was heralded around the world as exemplary. "Good architecture" thus became an unwitting byproduct of --if not a cynical smokescreen for-- large-scale political corruption. As long as critics, curators, and archi-tourists were gushing over all the fabulous new buildings in Spain, then maybe the hundreds of millions of euros of tax money that was being diverted into the pockets of politicians wouldn't be noticed. Or worse yet--this being the land of the picaresque por excelencia-- maybe such wrongdoing would even be tolerated if it meant Spain was being celebrated in the global spotlight, which it certainly was. The architecture boom was such a good party while it lasted, that nobody wanted to entertain the possibility that architecture, known to march hand-in-hand with power, might also be marching hand-in-hand with XL-size political corruption.

Many ordinary Spaniards are now sickened, not only by negative effects of the construction boom (urban sprawl, thousands of empty buildings, unemployment, forced evictions, polarization of wealth, disappearance of the middle class, etc.), but also by the perception that architecture was somehow either directly or indirectly complicit with the boom. This feeling of betrayal is especially significant because Spanish architects generally enjoyed a high level of citizen respect until recently. Before the death of Franco in 1975, architecture students were an important contingent in the pro-democracy student movement, and a number of architects played leading roles in neighborhood-association struggles to improve living conditions in Spanish cities.

Spanish architecture was thus identified with an incipient democracy movement at one time. Corruption, on the other hand, directly undermines democracy, and it is interesting to note a change that occurred in Spanish architecture from the end of the Transition period to the boom-years of the late 90s and 2000s. Whereas up to the 1992 Olympics most public works projects concentrated on renovating public spaces and building new public institutions (schools, sport facilities, city halls, etc.), usually at the neighborhood scale; after 1997, the year that the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum opened, a new typology emerges that we might call an "architecture of tourism": cultural facilities that are so large, they could only have been designed with hordes of tourists in mind as the principal user-group. Alongside these publicly financed tourism mega-projects, private real-estate development built primarily for purposes of speculation began to spring up. Generalizing grossly, we could say that the pre-Guggenheim period's architecture had the improvement of the lives of citizens as its priority, while most of the building undertaken during the post-Guggenheim boom years now ultimately had tourists and foreign investors in mind, in addition to voting citizens of course.

The more the construction industry profited (and the more they donated to political parties such as the PP or Catalonia's CiU party), the more Spanish architecture excelled in recognition and won international competitions. Coincidence? Or is it merely a case of having to take, as it were, the good with the bad (and the ugly)? The boom is also the period during which a significant number of prestigious Spanish architecture magazines went to global distribution, and when many celebrated architects from abroad started building in Spain and vice versa. Numerous architectural master's programs aimed at foreign architecture students appeared at the same time that many Spanish architecture students and academics went abroad to study or become leading figures at some of the most prestigious architecture schools. Thus, even architectural theory and criticism "boomed" alongside the construction and architecture boom, gaining increasing global recognition.

Spanish architecture thus shifted from mainly local concerns to chiefly global concerns. Accordingly, attention shifted from the concerns of citizens to those of tourists, consumers of global media, international financial speculators, and architectural academia. But all this changed from one day to the next when Spain's feverish construction bubble suddenly burst in 2008.  Architects themselves were not only suddenly out of work, but were also suddenly shunned by a society that until then had regarded them as heroes. Unfair scapegoats? Perhaps. In any case, a profession that was societally respected and internally bonded was now coming apart, both literally and metaphorically. Since the great crash, there has been almost no work, no income, and no optimism. A very high number of architects have been forced to move abroad, some as far as the Americas or Australasia. Interestingly, at this moment more US architecture schools are headed by Spanish architects than ever before (a group colloquially referred to as "The Spanish Armada").

Back in Spain, meanwhile, a law has been tabled to "liberalize" the profession and make it more "competitive" (we all know what that word really means). Enrollment in architecture schools is way down, while paper architecture, collectives, collaborating (once again) with activist groups and neighborhood associations, and un-solicited architecture are up, as are "alternative" spatial practices that approach art. Such alternatives to traditional practice, even if these put yet less bread on the table, show the inventiveness and persistence of Spanish architects, who are some of the best-educated in the world.

We are now being told that the crisis is over, and that it's all going to get better from now on; that our sacrifices are finally bearing fruit. While we are being told this, the majority PP government is passing an anti-protest and hence anti-democratic "Citizen Safety Law" the likes of which have not been seen since the Franco era. Another law designed to protect coastal construction is being reformed to facilitate construction on those few remaining stretches of coastline that have not been destroyed already, while another law is being entertained that would provide an instant Spanish (and hence EU) passport to anyone "investing" half a million euros in Spain; a law obviously aimed at reducing the current surplus of approximately 800 000 apartments. Perhaps the PP ultimately wants to kick-start another con-struction boom; a re-ron. Only this time, the spectacular hotel casinos for both tourist consumption and real-estate speculation in one (giving a whole new meaning to the term "multi-use building") will be built by global developers and their brand of global architects. The Spanish government has already shown that it is willing to bend over backwards (which in Spanish translates as "bajar los pantalones", or lower the trousers) in order to meet the demands of developers, such as easing laws concerning money-laundering, smoking in public buildings, foreign work visas, and of course land-use zoning. What the failed negotiations over EuroVegas reveal is just how low the Spanish government is willing to go in lowering its trousers. The only one of Sheldon Adelson's demands that it couldn't meet was a guarantee that future governments would not recede on the final agreement. A democratically elected government cannot, of course, ever agree to such a condition--only a dictator is in a position to do so.

Although EuroVegas thankfully fell through in the end, the eagerness with which this project was embraced by ruling politicians paints a dismaying picture of Spanish architecture in the coming decade or two. It will likely become two-tiered and highly polarized, just like Spain itself, with a handful of local architecture collectives designing food banks, emergency shelters for the homeless, and Single-Room Occupancy dwellings for NGOs, while a handful of superstar "developer-architects" (with names like BIGGUS DICKUS, Co-opted Himmelb(l)au, OMG, and Frankly Garish) will probably be brought in to design private hotels, casinos, tourist apartments, gated communities and luxury marinas. There will be very little in the way of museums, since so many have been built in the last decade that there is little to no money left for their collections. In fact, public work will all but disappear, since there is little public money anyway, growing public opposition to these kinds of projects, and since it is no longer as profitable a method for filling the coffers of ruling political parties. But the PP party has already found another way to profit from the public sector: privatizing it by selling off public institutions such as Spain's regional health-care or education systems to their cronies.

This time around, "architecture" will have little to gain.



2013/01/25

Pseudo-Choice

Potato chips, or crisps, come in a fantastic panoply of artificial flavors. BBQ, Ketchup, or "regular" are standards the world over. Then there are also what we might call "regional" chip flavors, such as wasabe in Japan, Dijon mustard in France, or cured ham in Spain. Recently, two very interesting new chip flavors came on the market in Spain: "FC Barcelona" and "Real Madrid".


The rivalry between these teams is legendary, of course, extending well beyond the football pitch and into just about every other aspect of life in Spain, especially politics: FCB is a symbol of Catalan nationalism while RM symbolizes Castilian centrism.

Yet, lo and behold, both of these potato chips taste exactly the same. Their saltiness, texture, color, and even the sound they make when consumed are identical. At least, I would think, one of these might taste like "calçots" and the other "cocido madrileño". No such luck though.

But then, maybe these chips are not about chips at all. In fact, all this really has nothing whatsoever to do with junk food gastronomy. No, this is entirely about merchandising and product tie-in; a perfect example of form over content. The chips are just a pretext for us to "freely" choose and buy a banner through which to assert a "personal" identity.

The scary thing is that sameness cynically and manipulatively disguised as democratic choice--this pseudo-choice--is not just happening in the world of potato chips, but in politics, cities, architecture, product design... wherever things are tarted up on the outside to appeal to a different identity, but in reality contain nothing but more-of-the-same on the inside.

We are what we are sold, not what we eat.

2012/06/03

Not So Different



"Spain is Different" was a tourism campaign slogan coined in the mid-1960s by dictator Francisco Franco's Ministry of Information and Tourism (!), when it was headed by the late Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a man who would transform into a democrat decades later and continue a long-lasting political career until his death this year at age 90. Fraga's slogan became very effective, not only attracting millions of tourists and therefore much-needed foreign currency to revive Spain's moribund economy decades after its devastating civil war, but also serving to re-brand Spain as "hip"and "fun" at a time when it was isolated and only beginning to gradually open up to the world. Fraga is also known for having relaxed censorship laws during the 1960s, leading to the emergence of the popular expression "con Fraga hasta la braga!" ("with Fraga all the way to the panties!"). Such actions led him to be perceived as a relative reformer from within the dictatorial regime, making him relatively popular at that time. After Franco's death in 1975, however, when students and workers protested massively to demand democracy, Fraga was the Interior Minister who publicly proclaimed "La calle es mía!" ("the street belongs to me!") and ordered police to shoot demonstrators, killing five and wounding many dozen. Needless to say, this heavy-handed action caused him to be largely despised thereafter, ruining the relatively good reputation he had enjoyed until then.

Curiously, a multinational corporation that designs and manufactures computer and entertainment products started out by similarly  branding itself as "hip" and "fun" with a slogan that rings quite similar to "Spain is Different". And now, news of some rather heavy-handed and sordid business practices are similarly beginning to ruin its reputation.

Late in his life, Fraga dedicated his energy to an ambitious cultural and economic development project of which he is the brainchild, the City of Culture of Galicia, perhaps in an effort to restore his legacy. He organized an international competition in 1999 that was won by Peter Eisenman (an article I wrote on it can be read here), but curiously, one of the finalists in this competition, OMA, submitted a design for a building in the shape of a ring (a project which for some reason is not published on OMA's website). Coincidentally, the corporation whose slogan is "Think Different" is expected to soon begin construction of a building designed by Norman Foster that is shaped like...you guessed it: a ring.

Who would ever have thought that the story of a veteran politician from Spain and that of the world's biggest IT corporation could sound so similar, or perhaps better said: not so different?

2009/06/04

BMW Welter


Luxury automobiles are fetish items par excellence. The advertising, branding and merchandising of this kind of consumer good is designed to appeal to our emotions, not our rationality. Why else would we buy something that devalues by up to a third the moment we drive out of the dealership? High-end cars are not sold to us based on their technological virtues, even though a great deal of research goes into automotive technology. They are sold on values that tap our desires to be seen to live a certain lifestyle and attain a certain social status. The refrain of “tell me what kind of car you drive and I’ll tell you who you are” is not entirely unfounded, and the mere sight of certain brands of high-end automobiles can conjure all sorts of stereotypes about the identity of the owner. Volvo: tweed-clad, tenured university professor. Porsche: young and nouveau riche. Mercedes: conservative executive. BMW: aggressive entrepreneur with little time to lose. Hummer: I’m super-rich so fuck off.

Over the last decade, a number of automotive companies—especially German ones such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and BMW—have embarked on media-friendly architectural projects designed, among other things, to build brand equity. There is now a collection of sophisticated automotive architectural works throughout Germany by the likes of UN Studio, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Delugan Meissl, providing a perfect excuse to fly into Frankfurt, rent a roadster, load some Kraftwerk into the sound system and go on a whirlwind Autobahn tour of these sites.

The most outlandish of these new buildings is BMW Welt in Munich, an "experience" and "customer delivery centre" adjacent to the corporation’s factory, museum and landmark Four-Cylinder office tower. Designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, BMW Welt has won several awards, including the Wallpaper 2009 Award for “Best New Public Building” (just how public is this building really?), the World Architecture Festival 2008 Award in the “production” category (was there no “consumption” category?) as well as the RIBA European Award in 2008, the jury of which praised its “spectacular cloud-like roof”.

Now, I suppose three esteemed architectural award juries can’t be wrong, but I have tried and tried and cannot for the likes of me see the virtues of BMW Welt. The building is an automobile and motorcycle showroom the size and feel of an international airport terminal. Its idiosyncratic architecture has no shortage of entertaining quirks, folds, twists, whims and conceits, but I can't help but think that these tricks are trying pathetically to make the building feel less commercial and more artistic. They seem more like hollow gestures. Naming the roof a “cloud”, the floor a “landscape” and the entrance feature a “whirlwind” is cute, but it is still an oversized commercial showroom.

Yes, the building is formally complex and impeccably crafted down to the last detail. It is architectural bravado, but that's just about all. Despite the beautiful cars, beautiful salespeople, and beautiful views onto the neighbouring Olympic Stadium and BMW buildings from the 1960s, BMW Welt feels empty and devoid of soul.

If the architecture is supposed to build up the company’s brand equity the way its highly effective television and print advertising campaigns have consistently done, then this building falls short in comparison. Give me the BMW ads on TV—they are more thought-provoking.





Too bad the stylist didn't know all the connotations of the word "lemon"...

2008/11/02

Welcome to the Hotel Barcelona

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Barcelona is in the tail-end of a hotel construction boom. And Barcelona being “Barceloooooonaaaaaa” means, of course, that these have to be designer hotels. Designery types such as Richard Rogers, Dominique Perrault, Carlos Ferrater, Oriol Bohigas, Juli Capella, Enric Ruiz Geli, Oscar Tusquets, and Ricardo Bofill (to name only some) all have a four- or five-star hotel in the works if not recently completed.

Interestingly, a number of new hotels are high-rise point-towers à la Benidorm, which is not in itself a bad thing since the city has nowhere to grow except in height. But others are being built in some rather questionable areas. One new hotel has recently been built on the side of Montjuïc hill, a public park of historical importance in which the construction of new buildings is strictly prohibited. It is painted dark green in a pathetic attempt to blend in with the hill’s vegetation; yet another example of what I have termed "everyday camouflage" (see Lotus International #126). Another hotel—an embarrassingly awful clone of the Burj al Arab Hotel in Dubai—is going up right at the edge of the sea, another non-buildable zone. One can’t help but wonder if the city isn’t making some very special concessions to hotel developers. Perhaps that is why the Ajuntament (City Hall) launched the advertisement campaign “Visc(a) Barcelona”, some months ago; a wordplay that in Catalan that means both “I live in Barcelona” and “long live Barcelona!” This latest campaign is obviously aimed at making residents proud to be living in a city well on its way to having the most hotel rooms per capita next only to Las Vegas.

Now I’m thinking to myself: this could be heaven or this could be hell.

Fine, but what does this mean for architecture? Well, for one thing it means that the hotel is possibly eclipsing the museum as architecture’s favorite building type. When designing a hotel, an architect can show off their talent much more than with a museum, since one can design a whole way of life from the building itself down to the toilet paper dispenser. When designing a museum, an architect must restrain herself from upstaging the art, but a hotel is an architect’s wet dream: a chance to do a work of "total design"; to control absolutely every aspect of the life lived inside. The fact that people usually only inhabit hotels for a relatively short period of time makes total design tolerable, even attractive. Hey, it might even be fun to try out a totally designed environment for a holiday experience. Architecture, once the stuff of Grand Tours and now that of global media events, has always been better suited to tourism, travel and temporary inhabitation than to dwelling, Being, or everyday life. Perhaps we can say that architecture has finally found its true "home".

Hal Foster, in his incisive book Design and Crime (and other diatribes), argues that, not unlike the turn of the last century, around the time that Adolf Loos published “Ornament and Crime”, we have once again entered an era of total design, one that he terms “Style 2000.” Perhaps Foster was responding to Mark Wigley, who asks in Harvard Design Magazine #5 “Whatever Happened to Total Design?” In any case, the hotel has eclipsed the home as the locus of total design today. Loos's "poor little rich man's home" is today the poor little rich man’s home away from home.

They’re living it up at the Hotel Barcelona. Such a nice surprise. Bring your alibis.

2008/09/24

World Glamor Festival

The “World Architecture Festival” is being launched in Barcelona in late October. Is this good news or bad news?

The first thing that should be pointed out is that “WAF08” is being organized in London, not Barcelona. A click on “about us” at worldarchitecturefestival.com reveals the following bit of information: “The Festival is being launched as an annual event by Emap, the media group which runs other festivals including the World Retail Congress and Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival” (my italics). Hmm.

The second thing that needs to be mentioned is that a three-day visitor pass to this festival costs 600 euros. For students, the cost is “only” 150 euros.

It seems that this promises to be an architecture event “Cannes style”. Will there be walks along the red carpet? Will Lord Foster arrive in his helicopter? Will the paparazzi be out in force? Will Entertainment Tonight provide those of us who can’t attend this event (due to conflicting agendas, of course) their detailed analysis? Look, here comes a famous patron from Dubai!

What will Wolf Prix talk about at his keynote address celebrating 40 years of Co-op Himmelb(l)au—how he went from being anti-establishment in 1968 to building for multinational corporations such as BMW today?

Too bad I can’t make it.