Kendall Colloquium on Art and Design

Keynote Adress Abstract
Alex Bitterman, Assistant Professor, School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.

email: alex.bitterman@rit.edu
website: http://multi.cias.rit.edu | http://alexbitterman.wordpress.com

Part and Parcel: a critical evaluation of the role of public architecture and contemporary place branding in the creation of the city image.

Iconic structures, buildings, and urban conditions have for centuries helped the public to identify specific cities. Structures such as the Eiffel Tower and buildings such as the Louvre and La Defense are commonly associated with Paris; much in the same manner that the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and Times Square are unique to New York. These iconic constructs provide an understructure that is used to assemble a visual image of place, and collectively form a unique visual identifier that represents a specific city. The universal recognizability of these images is a significant component of place-based identity and in this manner shares a relationship to contemporary place branding efforts.

As place brands develop and become increasingly pervasive, the value of architecture as the principal means of defining place has begun to shift, and is becoming one mode among many more ephemeral modes including the development of place-based logotypes, signature urban objects, colorways, transportation brands, advertising campaigns, and slogans. These different approaches of place branding mesh along with architecture as part of a contentious debate often marked by concern over social and economic division, control, and the corporatization of public space. Like resistance to place branding, opposition to "starchitecture," is often a very public rallying point for those concerned about the invasion of shared community spaces and places by quasi-commercial public space. The vociferous and often negative reaction to high profile architectural projects closely mirrors a countercultural backlash to contemporary place branding exercises in many communities across North America. This presentation will evaluate a number of recent controversial building projects as well as several contemporary place brands and will aim to identify the common threads of these ongoing changes.