Archinect - News

Zaha Hadid Architects transforms the classic billboard into public art

2018-09-04T15:00:00-04:00

JCDecaux has taken the wraps off a unique piece of out-of-home inventory in London designed by Zaha Hadid Design. The agency briefed the agency to redefine 'the design language of billboards'. It ditched the conventional shapes and frames that have steered the industry to date. Dubbed 'The Kensington', and located on the road from London to Heathrow, the structure takes the shape of a curved double-ribbon.

Zaha Hadid Architects has created a new design for street advertising with JCDecaux Group, a multinational corporation known for its bus-stop advertising systems and billboards. Creating a sculptural advertising approach, the firm's design reinvents the classic billboard into public art. Brands have been invited to bid for placement on the 85 by 20 foot screen structure. So far Audi and Coty are the first to sign up.

"The new real-estate concept of ethnic cleansing" gets investigated

2017-04-04T17:58:00-04:00

It is true that the developers of Europe’s largest regeneration project don’t appear to do ordinary. But they don’t seem to do many black people either...Speak to any property-marketing agency and they will tell you their east-Asian clients are buying a piece of England, which – for them – means blond-haired, blue-eyed Burberry models.

In a particularly taut and enjoyable piece for the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright investigates the questionable marketing tactics behind a starchitect-studded project in England that is catering mainly to East Asian buyers, among several other structures being sold primarily to off-shore clients. Are the ethics of the profession being comprised to make some cold hard cash? As Wainright notes:

In the computer-generated visions emblazoned across the site hoardings, the bustling cafe-lined streets are inhabited by an almost entirely monocultural society of white thirtysomethings. Women with long blond hair and shopping bags, occasionally accessorised with prams, fill the foreground of a scene drenched with that scorching Miami sunshine so familiar to this part of Britain’s capital. “New exciting concept coming soon,” coos another billboard over a vacant shopfront where this tableau is intended to unfold. The new real-estate concept of ethnic cleansing.

Tom Wiscombe redesigns the L.A. billboard (and is chosen over Zaha Hadid's proposal)

2016-10-20T12:39:00-04:00

Although Los Angeles has had its battles over supergraphics—those painted on advertisements that often stretch multiple stories on a building's facade—the billboard as a concept has received substantially less attention, unless the provocative imagery on it causes fender benders. However, Tom Wiscombe's proposal for digital, vertically aligned, two-sided billboards that allow people to walk inside of them injects new life into an otherwise sleepy structure, making them less car-centric and more about public space.

The proposed billboards, which were chosen via a West Hollywood RFP over designs submitted by Zaha Hadid, Gensler, and the MAK Center, will be placed in public plazas along West Hollywood's section of Sunset Boulevard.

For more on Tom Wiscombe:

When does a billboard become a protected landmark?

2016-05-09T14:06:00-04:00

If someone told you today that a new, brightly lit neon sign was going up across the street from where you live, you might react with disgust at the thought of such a commercial eyesore invading the skyline of your community. Yet when some older sign or billboard is threatened, everyone is suddenly up in arms, rushing to its defense. How does something as mundane as outdoor advertising grow to become considered an essential piece of the urban fabric?

“They become landmarks, loved because they have been visible at certain street corners — or from many vantage points across the city — for a long time,” writes Michael J. Auer in the brief. “Such signs are valued for their familiarity, their beauty, their humor, their size, or even their grotesqueness. In these cases, signs transcend their conventional role as vehicles of information, as identifiers of something else. When signs reach this stage, they accumulate rich layers of meaning. They no longer merely advertise, but are valued in and of themselves. They become icons.”

Visual pollution: inside the global movement to ban urban billboards

2015-08-13T16:21:00-04:00

In 2007, [São Paulo] Mayor Gilberto Kassab implemented the Clean City Law, labelling outdoor adverts a form of “visual pollution”. In a single year, the city removed 15,000 billboards and 300,000 oversized storefront signs. [...] The ubiquity of outdoor advertising means that we have come to take it for granted; accepting both its presence and its purpose as natural features of the urban environment.

Previously on Archinect: Rethinking Billboards as homeless shelters, and as land art projects in Art + Architecture: The Los Angeles Nomadic Division Sets Up Camp.

Architecture as Visual Device -> Cologne cathedral to switch off lights

2015-01-03T22:18:00-05:00

By switching off the floodlighting we want to make those on the march stop and think. It is a challenge: consider who you are marching alongside.

Cologne cathedral to switch off lights in protest at anti-Muslim march.

Two strong reads are possible, one with the actual intent of the official response to racist march to show church's disapproval, the other is more involuntary, perhaps recalling the core of the situation as the idea of crusades are reflamed across Europe in recent times. Perhaps it will never be possible to take marchers' cross away.

A quote from

" Most Pegida followers insist they are not Nazis but patriots who worry about the “watering down” of their Christian-rooted culture and traditions. They often accuse mainstream political parties of betraying them and the media of lying."

Given the 'scale' of the gesture though, I need to conclude this news bit by saying architecture is a powerful medium for public to read messages and the off switch is always there to say yea or nay.

That old Eden of a ballpark

2014-10-13T00:26:00-04:00

Ricketts got most of what he wanted. Alderman Tunney was again involved in the negotiations and he said the mayor’s office essentially decided that “one of the most generous sign packages ever” was a reasonable trade-off for the Rickettses’ willingness to spend their own money. He added ruefully: “There will be advertisements coming out of everywhere. We will have our own little Times Square right here at the corner of Clark and Addison.”

Barry Bearak digs into the Ricketts family, the Cubs and future plans for Wrigley Field. From the "cursed" record of the franchise, to legal battles with the owners of adjacent rooftops, the family faces numerous challenges in turning around their investment. Though the ballpark may soon be placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the family has also announced upgrades and expensive renovations, which some claim would ruin the aesthetics.

A Lost Cause? Alfredo Jaar’s “A Logo for America” Coming to Times Square Again

2014-07-29T14:07:00-04:00

When Alfredo Jaar’s glittering “A Logo for America” video first played on a Times Square billboard in 1987, it riled up New Yorkers. [...] shows the words “This is not America” inside the outline of the United States. “A Logo for America” will receive a second life this week; beginning on August 1, the video will pop up on Times Square signs and screens between 11:57 pm and 12:00 am. But this 2.0 version loses some of the video’s original intent to reach a broad—and hopefully attentive—audience.

Rethinking Billboards

2014-07-11T13:52:00-04:00

Billboards are commanding territory all over the world, offering just a blaring message in their occupation. Some designers have been looking at how to better use this advertising infrastructure, with Slovakia’s Designdevelop proposing a use for the space as small-scale residences for the homeless.