Architecture and Advertising

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Architecture and AdvertisingElizabeth Hornbeck

a

a University of California , Santa Barbara , USA

Published online: 05 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Elizabeth Hornbeck (1999) Architecture and Advertising, Journal of Architectural Education, 5352-57, DOI: 10.1162/104648899564349

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Journal of Architectural Educati on, pp. 52–57

© 1999 ACSA, Inc.

Architecture and Advertising

ELIZABETH HORNBECK , University of California, Santa Barbara

THE ARCHITECTURE OF FRANK O. GEHRY DEFINES S ANTA MONICA AND

Venice like that of no other single architect. From the Santa Monica Place to the Edgemar Center on Main Street, as well as severalsmaller businesses and residences in Venice, Gehry has created a corridor of distinctive high-art design along Los Angeles’

westernmost edge. Apple Computer’s advertising campaign tries tocapitalize on that association, using both the architect and his build-ings to promote its product.

One building to be exact: the well-known “Binocular Building,”designed and built from 1986 to 1991 by Frank O. Gehry Associates(Figure 1). The building is owned by Omnicom, parent company of

the building’s original occupant, TBWA Chiat/Day, the advertising agency responsible for Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign. Di-vided into three radically different exteriors designed to suggest a shipon the north end and a tree on the south end (or, as suggested by Gebhard and Winter, “a rusting steel ruin”1), separated by a pair of three-storey high binoculars, the building stops traffic along this col-orful section of Main Street.2 For most of 1998, its north side sporteda large banner with a head shot of Gehry in front of his new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, captioned by Apple’s new slo-gan, “Think Different” (Figure 2).3 The ad serves as a sort of signa-ture to Gehry’s work, as well as an advertisement for the architect;because of TBWA Chiat/Day’s status as a client of Gehry the banner

advertises TBWA Chiat/Day as well.Unlike Apple’s other outdoor advertisements, which can be

seen around town, this ad is not located on a billboard. Instead,Gehry’s building itself becomes the billboard, the carrier for thiscommercial message, inserting it in a public space which is other-

wise relatively free of outdoor advertising. To my knowledge, thisis the first time that an example of high-art architecture has beenused for this purpose, and I am concerned about its implications.

Apple’s ad campaign, launched Fall 1997, features a widevariety of creative individuals, including artists, scientists, and greatleaders. Among them are the Dalai Lama, Bob Dylan, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Ted Turner, AlfredHitchcock, Amelia Earhart, Maria Callas, Martha Graham, andRosa Parks. Even Muhammad Ali and Jerry Seinfeld appeared in a recent television spot. The demographic spread of the group is tell-ing: More than three-quarters of the group are male; a similar pro-portion are white; and about two-thirds are dead. What thesepeople have in common is not their use of Apple computers. In-stead, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Apple’s goal is to cel-

ebrate “geniuses,” defined as people who “push the human ra ward.”4 Apple plans to spend about one hundred million dannually on its advertising campaign.

The inclusion of Frank Gehry in this distinguished gro Apple “geniuses” is not surprising. The labe l “genius” is intimconnected with Modernist discourse about art and architectufact many people in our society understand art purely in ter“geniuses and their works,” i.e., the parade of masterpieces thaerally make up a college survey-level Introduction to Art Hcourse. And the construct of the “genius” has likewise been fmentally based on the image of the white male creator. T

Chiat/Day’s Emmy award-winning television commercial for includes two more North American architects, Frank Lloyd Wand Buckminster Fuller. Wright, of course, is the most recognfigurehead of the architect-hero stereotype, the symbol of exindividualism immortalized in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead .

Perhaps moreso than some of Apple’s other “creative tarchitects represent Apple’s message because their vocationgarded as being both creative and technical. Frank Gehry,cially, is known for his high-tech style of architecture. Gehry’suses computers to help construct the sculptural and curviforms of buildings like the Bilbao museum. The office uses Csoftware running on an IBM RS 6000 computer; the softwar

gram was originally developed by the French software firm DaSystems to build Mirage fighter jets.5 Gehry’s firm also uautoCAD program, designed in-house, running on IBM ement. But Gehry himself does not use a computer, and Appleputers do not figure at all in the technological solutioncontribute to his professional achievements and to his identhe author of such technologically advanced structures—thcomputers are becoming increasingly more essential in architefirms and schools across the country, representing a large potmarket for Apple.6

In a study of how architects are depicted in print ads, Favro found that male architects are depicted as “creative anassured individualists . . . the reader is meant to identify wiindependent, affluent, confident male individual.” 7 For TChiat/Day, in its promotion of a message that advocates creand nonconformity, the white-male-genius epitomizes the cuideals of the elite corps of advertising executives who, as pointby Jackson Lears, have built an industry that seeks to univethe experience and values of their own socioeconomic class

Apple Computer’s attempt to create a hip new image for itselfthe likes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, for example) is cons

with the growing corporate trend to embrace “hip” as its o

o p a r c h


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culture. As Tom Frank has pointed out, “hip” is not only “ex-hausted as a mode of dissent,” but it is complicit with the ever-ex-panding corporate colonization of everyday life.9

Apple does not pay any of the “geniuses” who appear in itsads. In exchange for Gehry’s appearance, they donated computer

equipment, valued between $15,000 and $20,000, to a local school with which Gehry is involved. Gehry generally refuses to appear inadvertisements, but Apple’s charitable gesture, added to the persis-tent request of TBWA Chiat/Day, with whom Gehry has a long-standing client relationship, were enough to persuade him. He hasnot agreed to appear in television or print ads.

Today our visual culture is dominated by advertising images.Perhaps it is inevitable, then, that the lay person responds to advertis-ing—like art—on an aesthetic level, often without bringing any criti-cal response to the way in which it operates in society: the powerrelations it calls into play, the values it aims to produce and reproduce,and the methods of manipulation that it carries to ever new heights

(questions which apply equally to art). The fact that Emmy awards arenow given to television commercials confirms the uncritical stance with which they are received by the public. But when advertising isimposed on our public spaces, these questions demand our attention.

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign is extremely popular with people who work in the computer industry, though less so with non-Apple users. As one computer consultant told me, peoplein his field would much rather think of themselves as creative types,like jazz musician Miles Davis or Muppets creator Jim Henson,than align themselves with the stereotype of the computer geek.

Never mind the fact that most of the people in Apple’s adsuse Apple computers. The campaign suggests that, givechance, they would have.

Fans of the campaign generally think of themselves as who really do “think different.” They see themselves as nonconists, reflected by the fact that they use a computer that has a12 percent of the market share. Apple users are proud to see selves being put in the same category with the likes of the Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the commodification of

people apparently doesn’t trouble them. Nor does the inconof comparing purchase of a computer to dedicating and evenficing one’s life for a cause like religious freedom or civil righ

The commercialization of King and the Dalai Lama doseem to trouble the producers of the Emmy awards, eithepresented the second annual Emmy award for a television cocial to the “Think Different” television spot and its director, fer Golub of TBWA Chiat/Day.11 King and the Dalai promote the sale of Apple computers—and particularly the loyalty of current Apple users—through the cultural capita

1. TBWA Chiat/Day building, by Frank O. Gehry, Venice CA,

1986–1991. Photo by author.

2. Frank Gehry in Apple Computer’s “Think Different” adPhoto by author.


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lic impression of the creative thinking that architects provide for the world, and the value of architects as creative thinkers in our soci-ety.” And certainly, Gehry has not financially profited as directly asGraves has from his endorsements. Yet I would argue that the place-ment of the ad on Gehry’s TBWA Chiat/Day building, which is in-tended to provide greater significance through association, is aneven more radical infringement on the perceived autonomy of ar-

chitecture as an expression of communal identity—one of the pri-mary roles of monumental architecture in an urban environment.In other words, the problem is not the commodification of Frank Gehry—architects have a long history of that—but rather the im-position of a new layer of meaning on our public spaces, transform-ing them in the service of Apple Computer.

On a basic level, architecture defines spatial relationships and,by extension, social relations as well. Architecture defines the spacesin which we live and work, as well as the urban spaces which serveas the backdrop for our daily lives. Gehry has executed a numberof private and public commissions not just on the West Side butthroughout the city, including Hollywood, MacArthur Park, and

Exposition Park. The Disney Concert Hall, when completed, willfar outstrip Meier’s enormously popular Getty Center in terms of creativity and risk-taking. Gehry’s buildings ask us to think aboutarchitecture in a new way—to “Think Different,” as Steve Jobs,currently Apple’s interim CEO, might say.

Gehry’s creativity does not preclude the use of his architec-ture for commercial purposes. In the context of thecommodification of Modern architecture, it is no coincidence thattwo of Gehry’s most successful nonresidential works are shopping complexes: the Santa Monica Place mall (1979–1981) and the

Edgemar Center (1988–1989). These two designs, while foinnovative, are also highly functional and successful as commvenues. I am not arguing that architects should avoid assoc

with commercial cl ients; indeed, there is a strong case to bethat architects’ services are most valuable when they enhance chitectural quality of these everyday or “vernacular” buildingsthan just the elite arena of private homes and world-class mus

Gehry’s works insert architectural discourse into the rethe everyday, and into the communal identity of their neighoods. The Deconstructionist style of architecture practicGehry presents radical spaces and facades that challenge the n

of what architecture “should be,” notions that have been estaband reinforced both by classical humanist architecture and avant-garde architecture of Modernism in this century. In Darchitecture, human beings are no longer the “measure of all tstanding at the center of the space (both real and imagined) beat a basic level, there is no center any more. The human subno longer specifically male or specifically European—is canew relationship to her or his surroundings. Some like thsome do not, but in either case, Gehry’s imperative to “thinferent” goes far beyond choosing between two not-so-dissconsumer products like the Apple versus the PC. Gehry’s EdCenter, for example, invites creative use of that space in wa

seen in most minimalls. And in Los Angeles, whenever a miis not a minimall, we have something to be thankful for.

Some critical historians would challenge this interpretatDe-Con architecture. In her engaging and provocative book, Ature After Modernism, Diane Ghirardo attacks its practitioners an

works as “formal exercises [that] offer little toward the construca theory different from that of Modernism, and even less to reing the role of the architect. . . . In their absolute indifference toof context, their exaltation of the role of the architect as form-givinterpreter of society, it is difficult to discern significant depafrom dogmatic Modernism except in the particularities of form

While I agree that De-Con architects retain many of tsic assumptions and goals of the Modernist tradition they haherited, I have to disagree with Ghirardo’s dismissal of the vatheir formal experiments. The experience of space that one fiGehry’s Edgemar Center, for one, resists the label “shopping providing pedestrians with a unique and complex social spcontrast to its neighboring store fronts along Main Street. Ghpoints out that commercial space is qualitatively different frompublic space, a difference that she explains in her analysis of thlic sphere theory of Habermas and his critics.19 Yet, far from ining on the public sphere, the commercial aspects of the marke

4. Anonymous poster from SCI-Arc, 1995.


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have been an intrinsic part of public space for several centuries in the West. In early Modern Europe, the marketplace and market fair,virtually coextensive with fairs and carnivals, created a commercialevent that became the stage for uncontrolled and often subversivepublic activities.20 Commercial activity has the capacity to providespace for political and other noncommercial forms of expression;

whether this happens or not depends on a number of variables.Social spaces have always been fraught with advertising and

salespeople of varying repute, like the traveling salesmen and patentmedicine vendors of nineteenth-century America. As Lears haspointed out, such salesmanship promising transfigured selfhood has

evolved into the highly polished global industry that we know today.But while the former operated on a local level, with some degree of defacto accountability and an identifiable voice, today’s advertising ma-chine lacks all of these characteristics. While sanitizing and rational-izing its imagery in order to enhance its legitimacy, the modernadvertising industry has created an increasingly homogeneous cultureas it advances the ideological goals of corporate, managerial culture. 21

So, in light of this connection between architecture and com-merce, the questions remain: Why shouldn’t TBWA Chiat/Day useGehry’s building as a marketing vehicle for Apple? Why shouldn’tthe building’s owners be able to use the building in any mannerthey wish? Here the question of ownership comes down to the con-

flict between capitalism and community. The Frank Gehry adver-tisement is intended to appeal not just to architects, but also to theresidents of Santa Monica and Venice whose own self-identity isclosely associated with the community that Frank built. I refermainly to those who value buildings like the Edgemar Center as a public space, or those who walk along Venice Beach past theNorton House, with its distinctive “crow’s nest,” and feel how es-sential that building and others like it are in defining the characterof the West Side. The TBWA Chiat/Day building is a landmark inan important stretch of public space, the Main Street of Santa Monica and Venice. When public space and prominent landmarksbecome subordinated to a single-minded advertising message, they begin to lose some of the complexity of meaning which they holdfor the community at large. If the Frank Gehry Apple advertisement

were displayed on a billboard, it would be less insidious; but attach-ing it to a Gehry building subordinates the building’s artistic andsocial value to Apple’s advertising message.

In other words, Gehry’s architecture has played a big part indefining the community visually, not just the community of SouthSanta Monica and Venice, but the greater Los Angeles community as well. Richard Meier’s Getty Center may be the most ostentatiousfeature of our landscape, but Gehry’s signature architecture is a

thread that runs through the entire fabric of the city. If the inthat Angelenos take in this Canadian-transplant-turned-nativcan improve Apple’s corporate image, then by all means Apptake it. Will this change the way Angelenos perceive the fa“Binocular Building”? What about Gehry’s other builthroughout our city? Frank Gehry’s buildings have a lot about our community, about how we inhabit architectureabout our relationship(s) to culture. Will the artistic statementmake be muffled by the incessant shouting of Apple Compadvertising campaign, and its reduction of architectural identhat of the architect-creator and the corporate sponsors? W

idea of thinking differently become just another inane phrasloses its meaning through over- and misuse? That is up to theof architecture, one and all.

Notes

1. David Gebhard and Robert Winter, Los Angeles: An Architectura

4th ed. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1994), 38.

2. The centrally placed binoculars were conceived and created by

firm in collaboration with the Pop artist Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van B

See: GA Architect 10: Frank Gehry ed. Yukio Futagawa (Tokyo: Global A

ture, 1993), 116.

3. TBWA Chiat/Day moved out of the Gehry building in Septembto more spacious offices in Playa Vista; the Gehry “Think Different” adv

banner was scheduled to be removed when new occupants move in.

4. Yumiko Ono, “Apple Is Trying a ‘Different’ Image Polish,” Wa

Journal no. 203 (October 10, 1997): B8.

5. Paul Karon, “Built on the Process of Architecture,” Los Angele

115 (Aug. 12, 1996): D3.

6. Architecture schools vary greatly in the extent of computer usage

some, such as Yale, CAD courses are now a core requirement. See Alexande

“Invisible Cities,” in Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life, vol. 8, no.

August 1998):40–48. My thanks to Kenneth Breisch for bringing this articl

attention. CAD technology is primarily PC-based, though some Apple-baplications are now available.

Architecture per se is not one of Apple Computer’s primary market

gets; instead, their three focuses are design and publishing, education, an

sumer use (i.e., for the home and small office); Rhona Hamilton, Apple CoCorporate Spokesperson, telephone conversation with author, 21 August 1

7. Diane Favro, “Ad-Architects: Women Professionals in Magazinin Archit ecture : A Place for Women, ed. Ellen Perry Berkeley (Washington an

don: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 191.

8. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance (New York: Basic Books, 199thanks to Margaret Crawford for directing me to this source.

9. Tom Frank, “Hip Is Dead,” in The Nation, vol. 262, no. 13 (A

1996):16–18; my thanks to L isa Monti for bringing this article to my attFrank’s interest in corporate colonization derives from Guy Debord’s analy

sented in La société du spectacle (1967).



10. In reference to the Dalai Lama, this point was made by Michael Judge,“Apple Should ‘Think Different’ About Asia,” in The Wall Street Journal, no. 78

(April 20, 1998): A18.

11. Marla Matzer, “A ‘Different’ Stroke of Genius Earns an Emmy,” Los Angeles Times (September 3, 1998): D6.

12. Rhona Hamilton, telephone conversation with author, 13 May 1998.

13. Jennifer Golub, interviewed in Matzer, “A ‘Different’ Stroke of GeniusEarns an Emmy,” Los Angeles Times (September 3, 1998):D6.

14. Matzer: D6.

15. Jennifer Golub, telephone conversation with author, 11 September 1998.16. Franz Schulze, “La época de Weimar: Vivienda y vanguardia,” in

Monografí as de Arquitectura y Vivi enda 6 (1986 ), 38, as cited in Mark Wigley,

“Fashioning the Modern,” in Archit ectur e: In Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch, et. al.

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 149.

17. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MI1994), 195.

18. Diane Ghirardo, Arch itec ture Afte r Modernism, World of A

(London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 36–37.19. Ibid., 43. Habermas’s public sphere was necessarily a space in

democratic political participation could occur. His critics point out that ex

ary practices based on class, race, and gender made these spaces inaccesmany, and that commercial interests stifle free expression.

20. Studies of the carni valesque were pioneered by Mikhail Bakhti

Rabelais and His World, and have spawned a number of followers. Among tLears, op. cit., and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and P

Transgression (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986).

21. Lears, Fables of Abundance (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

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Architecture and Advertising