I’ve been having a hard time sleeping recently. Sadly, this is par for architecture school, and not just because they work us like Trotskyites in Siberia: projects get ya thinkin’, and once you start thinking you’re not sleeping. So, the latest thing is a precedent study (and two 1′:1/16″ models, naturally) for tomorrow. We’re studying display spaces, and I’ve been thinking of the most incredible display space on Earth: the Fifth Avenue Apple Store.
The only thing that store has on display is Apple’s confidence in their own brand. The logo is the singular thing making that building a store. Furthermore, there’s no “bulk” to the store, the size of a building being a traditional indicator that there’s stuff inside it. It’s really is just a brilliantly fancy, unbelievably successful entrance to a 24-hr consumer wonderland. Think about it: where else have you seen anything like it?
It’s Apple immense brand and product recognition that makes that kind of architecture possible. It’s literally shaped the building: people know that the Apple logo stands for things they want, and so the architecture has been reduced to the bare minimum it needs to function as a store. It’s something that architects don’t usually think about: how recognition of our program affects how we design our buildings. Or if we do think about it, we don’t carry it out to the extent the Apple Store has: a beautiful and complete resolution.
Realizing that, I think it’s interesting the assumptions we make when we design almost anything in architecture school. We get these really very specific briefs: design a delivery center for smart, design a hotel for W Hotels, design a theater for the TriBeCa Film Festival, and we don’t think about how that brand and its cultural currency affect our designs. We completely ignore the elephant in the room. That kind of 20th Century thinking absolutely needs to change: the world’s grown past a single site but our thinking hasn’t.
HOLY SHIT THE iPHONE IS OUT announced!!!!!!!!!@#!@#@!312jdkfalsdf commentary after I rush this master plan for my boss.
Figure 1. The Sex
Alright, yes, it’s fabrucking gorgeous. Folks, marriages were ruined and lives destroyed. Only Apple could put so many functions into one device without a clusterfuck. Everything’s simple, intuitive, and straight-forward: to call a number, touch it; to rotate the screen, rotate the iPhone; to browse your music, flick it with your finger. Everything else is from last century!
However, it’s gigantic (for an iPhone), it’s expensive ($500-600, with 2-year Cingular contract), and oh god the fingerprints. Also, it’s going to be a pain put info in without a stylus or zen-killing keypad.
I’m sure Apple will come out with the iPhone Nano for people with non-sextuple digit wages, probably something that’s “just” a phone and an iPod. You know, RAZR/KRZR/Chocolate-killer. They’d be stupid not—it’ll be like printing money.
The new Zune commercials are shit. (The Zune is Microsoft’s coming iPod rip-off.)
Why are the Zune commercials quite the crappy? Most of them look like a bunch of random “youth” stock footage. Sometimes, at the end, there’s a brief bit about the Zune’s features. The two parts are totally unconnected, but still jammed together, like the balding managers at Microsoft were hoping that the Zune would benefit from the footage’s residual coolness.
The iPod Ads, by comparison, constantly but unintrusively show the product being used. The “silhouette” dancers are brilliant because they make it easy to see yourself as one of them, the energetically cool. Both the iPod and the “cool” are highlighted and combined, with everything else blanked out, so that you form a strong association between the two. That is, “buy an iPod and this’ll be you.” That’s what the best advertising does: it makes you feel incomplete and inferior unless you buy whatever’s being advertised.
In other words, the Zune ads are awkward and clueless—Microsoft getting lost trying to imitate some sort of vaguely indie generic casualness. Apple’s ads actually advertise the iPod.
Everyone’s waiting for Apple to drop the iPhone this Monday, at the World Wide Developer’s Conference. Mobile phones desperately need the Apple touch because no one’s really managed to get it right. Interfaces are confused, software sucks, response time is slow, and too much crap is in the way of making a call. Right now, the bar’s set pretty low—all a phone really needs to do is look good and it’s a success (witness the Motorola RAZR series: good looks, crappy phone).
All Apple needs to do is beat this, the sexiest phone at the moment:
One-up the LG Chocolate’s design, cut the bullshit, add quad-band GSM, laugh all the way to the bank.
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