BRANDING IDENTITY

25th of April
Miguel Luengo organized an academic presentation and debate tittled Branding Identity:

"Learning from Las Vegas emerged from a healthy controversy that took place in 1972, in which it concluded that architects should be more receptive to the tastes and values of the common people and less immodest in their erections as “heroes” of high monuments to themselves. GG, 1998.

Learning from the existing landscape is the way to become a revolutionary architect. And not in an obvious way, like that wiping Paris to start again as proposed by Le Corbusier in the twenties, but in a different, more tolerant and thus questioning own way of looking at things.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning from las Vegas, 1977

Architecture is also a way to communicate, and although International Style positioned itself as the only true understanding of the discipline (objective, structure and function-ruled, white…)soon after new voices emerged and claimed for complexity and the symbolism of form.

Contemporary architecture around the world is looking for recognition, the Internet_ional Style that we are facing deletes identity and favours a rendered vision of fashion and immediate appareance. In a world full of brands, being recognizable (and desired) is crutial.

This open debate focuses on this branding framework, where already tested (and commercially approved) companies are exporting their identity mottos and are designing/building “little” portions of their homelands.

Commodities tabula rasa."