Branding & Architecture

As a strategy, branding differentiates one brand from the others. Through various prospects, such as the visual identity and the retail environment of a product, branding is able to reinforce the consumers' impressions to a product. The need for branding has become prevalent in the past decade worldwide. Many fashion brands hire famous architects to design their flagship stores around the globe.

As brand-name stores in major cities over the world get bigger and bigger, design of the retail space goes beyond being a billboard for the brand image. In fact, multi-level façade that front a city corner or a plaza, present another realm of possibilities to interact with the brand. For instance, with its white glass façade, the Louis Vuitton building conjures up an image of a "stalagmite" in the city on one of the most prominent corners in New York. Interestingly, this particular image created with such a recognizable brand becomes inseparable with the city context and in turn with the city brand itself.

LV New York, a monumental crystalline stalagmite in the city, located at the corner of 57th Street and 5th avenue in Manhattan.

Hudertwasserhaus

Hudertwasserhaus is an apartment in Viena, Austria. The Austrian artist, Friedenschreich Hudertwasser, is commissioned to design the house for the government. The blueprint of the house  looks like an Expressionist's painting rather than like an architectural drawing.  But to make the concept come to reality, Hudertwasser works with two architects,  Joseph Krawina and Peter Pelikan, who assist in programming the space.  Thus, with art and science, the house possesses the quality of sense and sensibility. 

Hudertwasserhaus is a baroque-style house. It features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a divine melody to the feet), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows.

Yohaku-no-bi

Yohaku-no-bi, meaning the beauty of paucity, is one of the concepts of Japanese aesthetics. In an art form, Japanese artists try to create a vacant space or a blank from which viewers, with their imaginations, can see things that are spiritual and philosophical. In other words, to appreciate, viewers not only start from an art's appearance but from its blank space provided by the artists. Thus, void, emptiness, and less-is-more are the key words for the concept of yohaku-no-bi. We can see yohaku-no-bi is applied to many Japanese art forms, such as Zen gardens (kare-san-sui) and Japanese ink and wash painting (sui-boku-ga).

A typical Japanese Zen garden 

the large surface of white gravel serves as the emptiness from which viewers can excite and capture their imaginations: gravel represents ocean; rocks represent island.

Japanese Esthetics

The philosophy of life extends not only from one’s personality but also from one’s geographical distribution, cultural custom, religious belief, and ethnic heritage.With no exception, Japanese people adopt an attitude toward life in which they despise completeness but admire imperfection of things－this results from Japan’s rugged terrain locating in a fault zone, a casual location of earthquakes and from its foul weather condition such as typhoons and frostbites. Therefore, under the insecurity of living circumstances, the Japanese realize that to pursue something perfect is impractical; on the contrary, to appreciate something defective can help them to meditate upon the incompleteness and finally come to comprehend the beauty of being incomplete.