There was a time, not that long ago, when pretty much every architecture practice looked the same. A main typeface selected from a range of maybe four ‘modernist’ Sans Serif fonts and images shot at the widest possible angle from corners of buildings and spaces by one of maybe four different photographers. A horizontally scrolling website, probably built with Flash. And that was about the extent of it. Of course this isn’t intended as a dig, some of our best friends are architects!
Architecture is a highly regarded, professional discipline where brand has been less of an issue, until recently at least. Practices are able to trade primarily on reputation and kudos and of course the procurement processes that surround many of these large scale projects are kind of brand proof. This is obviously deliberate, as we all know brands are trickery devised to sell us things we don’t really need.
But what if that really isn’t the case. What if a brand can help you, not just by bringing you work but by clarifying your business in your own mind and the minds of your team as well as your client base. What if a brand can act as a magnet for the things that you want and need.
A huge part of building a brand is in defining who and what you are. In many ways this is the hard part. Perhaps for smaller practices this is more straightforward. It’s the same across the board, if your offer needs to appeal to a smaller cross section of people then it’s easier to define because they are more likely to be like you. The range of taste and appeal is smaller. Just looking at our immediate friends and neighbors, practices like Loader Monteith and McGinley Bell here in Glasgow or GRAS over in Edinburgh, we can see really well defined brands that have been properly considered and rolled out. With larger practices producing larger scale projects all over the globe (think Snøhetta or OMA), it’s maybe more difficult to think specifically about your particular audience groups, but perhaps a sense of world view takes over. An attitude and approach.
This always sounds a bit patronising but it still needs saying, when we talk about Brand (I know, we are all sick of hearing that word) we don’t just mean a Logo. We are referring to everything that is used as an expression of your business. Yes a logo, typeface, design system, layout, colour, but also photography, moving image CGI, UX, language, everything. With architecture there are also unique elements that come into play like model making and of course let’s not forget, the work itself. Considering all of these components together helps build a sense of who you are as an organsation, what’s important to you and what you want to achieve. A brand isn’t a thing, it’s a set of tools, an attitude, a feeling.
It’s really important to understand what you want a brand to achieve for you. In the last couple of years we have undertaken two rebranding projects for reasonably large practices that were born from quite different motivations.
Ica came to us to help them reposition their business as experts in architecture and interior design for the hospitality sector. This was an area where they already had considerable experience and they had identified that the future of the business lay in that direction. Having a very clearly defined goal like this is really important in the process of creating a brand, it provides a starting point but also a benchmark against which the development can be measured. Ica had strong feelings about the aesthetic approach which enabled us to build a clear visual character but also to extend this out to an approach to language, for example the strap line Welcome Change as well as an attitude to all kinds of imagery where a warmth and a sense of experience superseded the need to show all aspects of a building or space.
This idea of experience was pivotal for Ica but is also central regardless of the nature of the projects you create. One of the hardest things about expressing a building, environment or space is the fact that to really experience it how it is you have to be there. Traditionally architecture has been photographed in an incredibly sterile way, spaces devoid of people and the ‘texture’ (mess) that they bring. Views that are impossible with the human eye. Representations that may well play to the purity of a design but don’t reflect the reality of a place or the people who occupy it. Buildings and places are affected by the time of day, the weather, the season. These are all things that the architect will consider so they are all things that need to be expressed via the brand content.
Sometimes there are different, more pragmatic motivations. Oberlanders came to us to help them re-brand their business and bring consistency and structure as well as a more focussed message after a period of rapid growth. The practice now had multiple offices all over the UK and functioned as a series of teams specialising within particular sectors. This is quite a different proposition to Ica in that they weren’t pushing towards a particular field but rather presenting a particular approach or process that was applicable regardless of the nature of the project. Listen closer. Create together. Deliver better.
Total Environment, based in Bangalore, India, are a very large organisation who have evolved from a team of architects to developers and constructors of their own projects, manufacturers of their own building materials and furniture, factors of their own developments and even operators of the amenities within the communities that they create. Working across India and the US their developments are founded in some very specific principles around outdoor space, sensitive, human materials and attention to detail. The very nature of their organisation meant that they had vast array of departments and sub-brands that had brought a sense of disarray to their communications. A system was needed to bring all of this together as a family and to unify the way each facet of the business communicated. Despite their scale the central ethos and audience for TE was really quite particular which enabled a very focussed approach to the aesthetics of the brand through a very formal and quintessentially modernist identity system, informed by the visible influence or Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, through to a much softer and more human scale approach to messaging and imagery.
Yes a brand can help you sell your wares. Be that phones, trainers, cars or the design of buildings. And yes sometimes brands can create a, perhaps artificial, need in us. They do this by positioning themselves in our minds, by aligning with our ideas and ideals. Our aspirations. Our own ‘personal brands’. Of course this is a kind of cycle and there are some massive brands who have nefarious ambitions I’m sure.
But on a human scale a brand can help your business build a stream of the kind of projects you want, to help you become the kind of organisation you aspire to be. A brand can help you align with suppliers and collaborators who want to work with you because they share your values and want to be part of the projects you create. Your brand can be generous and open and promote them, exposing their product or services to a new audiences. Expanding networks. Your brand can help you attract and develop your team by providing a clear and shared understanding of what the goal is. Why you do what you do.
The world has become suspicious of brands but really they are simply mechanisms that help us get our ducks in a row so we can express our ideas to the people who matter in a voice that is ours and ours alone.