Good branding makes emotional and experiential connections with its audiences. In Building Brands, I build upon this truth of contemporary branding practice by expanding it to the three-dimensional discipline of architecture. We don’t often think of having emotions towards buildings and spaces, but just like hearing an old familiar song will bring back specific memories, certain places, buildings, and spaces elicit strong emotions from their inhabitants. My intention of bringing the architects’ and designers’ point of view to branding practice is to enrich branding as three-dimensional and spatial.
The thick impasto style of Kyffin Williams’ paintings could not be more different from the subtle transparencies of Jones’ watercolours: layers of paint applied with a palette knife to sculpt the mass of the great mountains of the Ogden Valley - Snowdon, Glyder Fach, Glyder Fawr and Tryfan. But perhaps the inspiration comes from the same Celtic origins. ‘It is in Wales that I can paint with the greatest freedom’ Williams said.
In late 1944, while Britain was still at war and paper rationing was in force, Lund Humphries published a large-format, luxuriously produced, beautifully designed monograph on Henry Moore’s sculpture and drawings. In a review a few months later in theBurlington Magazine, Nikolaus Pevsner described it as ‘more ambitious and more complete than any brought out in England for a very long time on the work of one individual sculptor’ and ‘a great achievement of British publishing after five years of shortages and controls’. Patrick Heron in an interview many years later described it as the book which ‘created Henry Moore’.
The journey that led to my book began nearly five years ago on yet another trip to visit one of the most celebrated houses of the last one hundred years; this time it was ‘Fallingwater’, on PA Route 381 out of Pittsburgh in the States. Although I knew the house inside out and must have read nearly everything printed about it, as an architect I know that only actually experiencing a building allows you to really understand it – to feel it.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th anniversary celebrated in two publications from Lund Humphries Frank Lloyd Wright on steps outside draughting studio, Taliesin West, 1942. Photo by Robert Carroll May. Courtesy of...
In May 1939, nearly 75 years ago, the celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited London and gave four lectures at the RIBA. The meetings were hailed at the time as ‘perhaps the most remarkable events of recent architectural affairs in England. No architectural speaker in London has ever in living memory gathered such audiences.’ With great […]