Grace Ong Yan, author of the upcoming 'Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture', talks to Meris Ryan-Goff about the inspirations for her book, the peculiarities of corporate architecture, and the keys to successful branding through buildings...
MRG: How did the idea for the book, Building Brands, first come about? And can you tell us about any surprising discoveries or particular challenges during the research process?
GOY: The topic of architectural branding grew out of an interest in how design and architecture engage people and shape human activities. I became involved with branding as a practicing architect and interior designer at Gensler New York. Together in an interdisciplinary team, we designed branded environments for companies like Toys R Us, International Center for Photography, and Bally. I was immediately fascinated by the practice of branding as an alternate lens of design. I found brand design to be in some ways more creative, interdisciplinary, and service-oriented than the world-renowned architecture firms that I had worked in previously. Architecture firms, especially those lead by famous architects, approach design as the development of a signature design. By comparison, I found that with brand design, the script was flipped—the process was not a realization of an architect’s vision, but about coming up with new design ideas to define the client's identity. This invigorating and very freeing experience left deep impressions on me. As I embarked on my doctoral studies in architectural history and theory with these insights, I felt I could offer a unique perspective.
The greatest challenge of researching corporations is accessing their archives as they generally do not welcome outside researchers. Yet this is what I needed to do in order to bring a new interdisciplinary lens to architectural history by seeking to answer my initial question: Did the clients seek advertising and branding through the architecture that they commissioned? For my research on how architecture served as branding, it was imperative to reveal the company’s motivations about the architecture it commissioned. I quickly discovered that the best way to research a company’s papers is to study defunct companies. When a company goes out of business or gets bought out by another company, its extant archival papers— inter-office memos, board meeting minutes, letters between clients and architects, annual reports, employee magazines, in short, all the documents it leaves behind, end up in a publicly accessible repository. What I unearthed from the abundant Philadelphia Saving Fund Society and Röhm and Haas archives were just such fine-grained documents that informed and supported my hunch that architecture in the form of corporate headquarters served their clients as far more than offices to house their employees, but as important promotional tools and as a communication medium to the public.