Image is everything

Have you ever had the experience of buying something in the supermarket that just looked absolutely delicious, but turned out to be nothing short of appalling? Well, there's definitely a discrepancy between the image that we buy, and the actual product.

That lead the people behind pundo300.com to conceive their project "ads vs. reality", in which they compare 100 products with the image on the package. Some look more alike than others. It's not to rate a product or anything, just to get people thinking about the way the means and ends of the advertisement-industry is used...

I stumbled upon this via www.hard-c.com.

Shopping from a different perspective

No, I didn't make a major mistake with the images in this post. I didn't post them upside down, the signature store for the fashion designers Victor & Rolf in Milan actually looks like this. The boutique, conceived by Amsterdam-based designer offers a different view on things: everything in the shop - except for the pieces of clothing on display - is upside down. And I do mean EVERYTHING. It's not just the wood on the ceiling, or the doormat, or the chair, or the arches under the door, but even a runway is upside down.
It might sound a bit corny, but it gives a rather surreal effect that lifts the clothes out of their ordinary surroundings into a world of their own.

Fantasy architecture league

New York Magazine has remodeled itself into the client that most architects dream of: the one that doesn't pose any restrictions, but gives the designer freedom to do whatever they'd like to.

Well, that's almost true: they invited four architects to make plans for an empty lot in downtown New York. The rules were simple, and I quote "We required only that the result include a residential component and that it more or less meet zoning requirements."

It's nice to see the different approaches the invited architects took. Flank, for instance, came up with a concept to make affordable, middle class housing in this area - a type of dwellings that is not that well represented in the urban tissue of the area. Flank came up with a design, in which a corporate logo is integrated into the facade of the building. But it's not just a building with a billboard on the side of it - the billboard is fragmented to ensure that it's highly visible from a little distance, without interfering with the quality of the appartment as such.

But, if I were to decide which design should be built (if any of it would actually be built in the future), I'd definitely go with the proposal of Work AC, called The Locavore Fantasia. They went for a snazzy appartment building, with anurban farm on top. The whole is stretched to get a potential for maximizing farmland in the city - creating shorter lines of transportation, closer contact with nature, and all the other advantages of urban agriculture. The building is devised to have different crops on each floor. It might not only be urban agriculture, the building would also have potential for more recreational used green sites, such as golf courses, for instance. Also, art in the public realm is included in the proposal: the columns supporting the building (and leaning it to face towards the sun) are commisioned by artists. In the rather cute, Sim City-styled presentation drawing, they used a Brancusi to support the entire building...

It's all in the details...

I'm pretty sure that it isn't exactly what Mies v.d. Rohe was talking about when he said "God is in the detail", but this advertisements clearly show what a difference a detail can make. A detail in personal experience, that is. I found this advertisement for the Belgium optician Oogmerk via hardcopy, who got it, in turn, from what some would call lies.

Motorola City

When someone says "government and public safety solutions" to me, I am having trouble surpressing a deep rooted "YAWN!"

Until I saw the website that Motorola has for just those products. Normally, one would expect a simple site on which it is possible to browse through the products in a systematical matter. Well, they decided to go all out on an interactive site, on which is shown which kind of communication devices is needed to make critical situations in the public realm work out the right way.

A fashionable memorial

At the unveiling of the memorial at the Judenplatz in Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal allegedly said that "This monument shouldn't be beautiful, it must hurt." The monument was designed by Rachel Whiteread to portray the horrors of the holocaust. The inverted bookshelves - engraved with words stating that the monument was meant to commemorate the 65.000 Austrian Jews who were killed during the second world war.

But this didn't stop the high-end fashion brand Don Gil from using this memorial as part of a fashion campaign. The photos show a young, beautiful male model, casually leaning against the monument. The monument isn't depicted as a monument, but as a clean and smooth background for an advertisement. Oddly enough, there wasn't too much discussion about this. True, the Viennese Jewish Committee made some fuss about it, and as a reaction Don Gil took the images from their website. They still distribute the magazine in which it is published, though. It's a clear indictation of the impotence of monuments as such. If people don't see the meaning, they just see a beautiful image, to use for whatever purpose they see fit...


I found this case thanks to An-architecture.com.