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Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture
Grace Ong Yan
Lund Humphries, April 2021
Hardcover | 7-3/4 x 9-3/4 inches | 240 pages | 123 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781848224070 | $69.99
Between the Stock Market Crash and the Vietnam War, American corporations were responsible for the construction of thousands of headquarters across the United States. Over this time, the design of corporate headquarters evolved from Beaux-Arts façades to bold Modernist expressions. This book examines how clients and architects together crafted buildings to reflect their company’s brand, carefully considering consumers’ perception and their emotions towards the architecture and the messages they communicated.
By focusing on four American corporate headquarters: the PSFS Building by George Howe and William Lescaze, the Johnson Wax Administration Building by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lever House by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the Röhm & Haas Building by Pietro Belluschi, it shows how design devices of sign, fame, form and material brought company messages to the public. Drawing on original material from corporations’ archives, Building Brands brings new insights to corporate Modernism by examining how company leaders, together with their architects, conceived of their headquarters not only as the consolidation of employee workplaces, but as architectural mediums to communicate their identities and brands.
Dr. Grace Ong Yan is Assistant Professor at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, USA.
REFERRAL LINKS:
Some of the interesting tidbits I noted while reading the PSFS chapter in Building Brands include: George Howe’s pre-Lescaze partnership branch banks and an early tower design for PSFS, all of which are more Beaux-Arts than International Style; Howe and Lescaze’s discussions with the client about the horizontality versus the verticality of the facades, something that could be seen as just about architectural aesthetics but here is discussed in terms of the image the bank wanted to project to the public; many details on how the sign was determined, including the mounting of full-size mock-ups to determine if the bank’s name in full words or in acronymous letters should be used; seeing the building as “an entity,” with modern surfaces and furnishes extending to the interiors; and the way modern design was used to sell to both potential office tenants (air conditioning!) and bank customers. Perhaps most interesting was PSFS’s assertion that the tower design should advertise the bank, not the architects. This invitation for the architects to not repeat themselves on any subsequent designs, among other things, gets at the role of modern architecture in the hands of business, something carefully and capably explored in Ong Yan’s excellent book.
* Syndicated content from A Daily Dose of Architecture Books.
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