Archinect - News

Taco Bell to open a hotel in Palm Springs

2019-05-16T19:38:00-04:00

Get ready for “Bell”hops and Baja Blasts, Fire Sauce and Sauce Packet floaties, because The Bell: A Taco Bell Hotel and Resort is opening for a limited time in Palm Springs this August, meant for 18+ superfans. Complete with exclusive Taco Bell menu items and plenty of surprises, The Bell is sure to be the spicy twist of your summer. So pack your swimsuit, mark your calendars and start the countdown, because The Bell is about to make all of your taco dreams come true.

for a limited pop-up run this August, Taco Bell will open a hotel in Palm Springs (not to be confused with their permanent wedding chapel in Las Vegas).

Photo courtesy of Taco Bell

The Taco Bell-themed hotel is just one example of many recent strategies for well-established brands to develop interactive spaces as methods of promotional marketing. We recently covered a more permanent version with the recently opened Shinola Hotel in Detroit.

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.

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.

Cornered: London Building Innovatively Addresses Homelessness

2015-04-08T20:07:00-04:00

To promote its Nightstop program, in which volunteers offer homeless people ages 16 to 25 spare beds, homelessness charity Depaul UK launched a poster campaign Thursday that uses the architecture of buildings to help win the hearts and minds of passersby. Publicis art director Dan Kennard and copywriter Ben Smith told me in an email that the idea for the design came from “that quite true observation that in life, there are two sides to pretty much every story.”

Somewhere between a supergraphic and a PSA lies the ever-developing territory of outdoor advertising, an area in which Publicis London is making thoughtful, eye-catching displays.