Modernism and Architectural Branding: Re-casting the histories of corporate headquarters
Grace Ong Yan
In her new book, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture, Grace Ong Yan discusses the evolution of architectural branding in mid-twentieth century America. Through in-depth case studies, she demonstrates how clients and architects together crafted buildings to reflect their company’s brand, carefully considering consumers’ perception and their emotions towards the architecture and the messages they communicated
Fig 1: At the entrance to the Röhm and Haas Building, the abstract shapes of the columns create an arcade of light and shadow.
Today, we find ourselves constantly barraged with digital information and data – a virtual world more vast and complex than we can possibly comprehend. This has been intensified by our pandemic-era lives, as evidenced in our abundant Zooming, movie- and show-watching, and news-reading. Almost everything that we encounter in our man-made environment – everything we eat and wear, everything we come across as we spend our days – has been consciously branded. We find ourselves craving environments and things that make us feel – places that engender a sense of empathy. How can brands/companies hope to engender this emotional response? It is precisely this sense-driven quality that architectural branding provides – literally building brands as constructions and environments that offer rich human experiences.
By uncovering how architecture first engaged with and advanced the growth of branding in Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture, I suggest a new way of thinking about architecture’s past relationship with business. Understanding this overlooked and often misrepresented past will better arm architects and designers going forward, as they and their clients create new environments and construct new relationships within the current milieu.
Figure 2: A leasing brochure boasted of ‘Superb office space in the handsome new Röhm & Haas Building under construction where the most exciting urban renewal is going forward . . .’, c.1963. Courtesy of Science History Institute, Röhm and Haas Company Archives.
While architectural branding is thought of as a phenomenon that started in the 1990s, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture suggests that its formative period of development spanned the late 1920s to the early 1960s, a period that coincides with the rise of the large corporation in America. During this time, the corporate headquarters emerged as a dominant building typology. In this book, I examine the design of four important corporate headquarters from this era, each designed by a noteworthy architect for a prominent American company: the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of 1929–32, by the partnership of George Howe and William Lescaze; the S.C. Johnson Administration Building, in Racine, Wisconsin, of 1936–38, by Frank Lloyd Wright; Lever House, in New York City, of 1948–52, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and the Röhm and Haas Corporate Headquarters, in Philadelphia, of 1962–64, by Pietro Belluschi. While these four buildings have been previously studied as examples of corporate modernism, they have not been examined as architectural branding. During this period, collaboration between the fields of business and architecture advanced to the point of integration. Making use of previously unpublished company correspondence, as well as architects’ archives, and photographs of key buildings, this book tells an insider’s view of the debates, resolutions, and dramas around these buildings’ design and construction, as well as their crucial role in the history of modern architecture. The following excerpt examines how architectural branding evidenced itself in the 1961 headquarters for the Röhm and Haas chemical company:
Figure 3: Textured Plexiglas sunscreen device on top left, supported by bronze-coloured aluminium structural members. Credit: © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
’When the Röhm and Haas building was completed, it was by far the most sophisticated building on Independence Mall (fig. 1). The building’s strong horizontal pattern was articulated by the projecting edges of the floors and the textured sunshades of Plexiglas. The prominent nine-storey-tall, mid-rise building sits on a granite plinth, defined by perimeter landscaping of evergreen shrubs and low-growing myrtle. Lifted a few feet above the sidewalk, the headquarters building established a rarefied plane, thus setting an appropriate tone for the chemical company desirous of prestige. At the same time, the building established a respectful and diplomatic relationship to Independence Mall. The Röhm and Haas building’s reinforced-concrete structural system rested on a grid of prismoidal cast-concrete columns capped by wide, inverted pyramids, also of reinforced concrete. The building read as a light glass and acrylic mass atop muscular pilotis, with the ground floor stepping back five feet to create a continuous arcade (or ‘galleria’) around the building. The overhang and prismoidal columns defined the covered walkway around the entire ground floor with 22-foot-tall, vaulted ceilings. This dramatic space would become iconic in the company’s real estate brochures (fig. 2).
The Plexiglas sunscreen that enveloped the upper storeys of the Röhm and Haas building ingeniously displayed the company’s product, thus serving as branded architecture in its most explicit sense. It effectively merged branding and architecture, as the company’s product made direct connections with all who viewed the building. The building’s eight upper floors read as a bronze-tinted glass box. The heat-absorbing glass was fixed in place with bronze-coloured aluminium used for the exterior latticework supporting the sunscreens, spandrel panels, and interior metal frames. (fig. 3)
The sunscreens were hung five feet off the building by the aluminium lattice frame. Four-foot-high horizontal ribbons of bronze-coloured Plexiglas began at the top of the second floor and repeated eight times to the top floor. These corrugated sunscreens hung down over the upper portions of the windows on all sides of the building except the north. Brown, opaque, textured Plexiglas spandrel panels provided ornamental contrast with the exposed concrete structure. The panels’ slightly pebbly surface pattern (designed to eliminate large areas of reflection) took the form of shallow pans (fig. 4).’
By creating a framework around the building, Belluschi aimed to minimise the building’s bulk, which in turn respected the scale of Independence Hall. Initially, the client had wanted to showcase the vibrant colours that were available in Plexiglas and suggested a blue colour for the building panels (fig. 5). Belluschi objected, however, successfully arguing his case against the colour:
‘Pietro and I attended all meetings with our client and much of that related to visual impact issues. It was Pietro’s strong recommendation that the color of the Plexiglas be an earth tone, rather than a sky color favored by Röhm & Haas’s management. His reasoning made sense … he said a 500,000-sq-ft building will overpower the domestic scale of Independence Hall and it would be a mistake to have a bold color competing with Independence Hall. In a matter of minutes Otto and John Haas, along with their Executive Committee, bought Pietro’s recommendation. Later they were pleased that they followed Pietro’s recommendation.’
When questioned about his bronze and brown colour choice for the building, Belluschi reportedly said, ‘Go look at the Seagram Building.’ By referencing the seminal corporate headquarters, Belluschi signalled an important precedent as well as his continued allegiance to a Miesian model for his work.
Röhm and Haas’s Plexiglas sunscreen was a major architectural branding achievement. From the time Belluschi was hired, he embraced the idea of experimentation with Plexiglas: his understanding of the commission resulted in an exciting new identity for his client. At the same time, Belluschi created sunscreens to cover large expanses of glass on the building exterior. Responding to the problems associated with the widespread use of glass curtain walls, architects reasoned that screens cooled the glazed interiors. Because sunscreens provided the function of tempering harsh sunlight into interior space, architects considered them an environmental necessity.
In the narrative of Röhm and Haas branding, the Plexiglas sunscreen functioned as a kind of material signage displaying the company’s product on its most conspicuous surface – the facade. Thus, the display of Plexiglas enabled a connection with the public. When the Röhm and Haas building was being designed, theories on how architecture and the built environment affected the human subject were numerous and influential: these included Reyner Banham’s 1955 The New Brutalism, Jane Jacobs’s 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s 1964 Experiencing Architecture, and Aldo Rossi’s 1966 The Architecture of the City, among others. Experiencing Architecture, for example, considered the psychology of art. Universal concepts like spatial relationships, volume, and contrasting effects of solids and cavities, scale and proportion, were the means to achieve empathy in modernism. Aesthetics in this vein was not about style but about how everyone, inclusively, could relate to and experience architecture. This was very much in line with not only Belluschi’s convictions about humanistic concerns in architecture but the emerging practice of branding, which aims to make emotional connections to people.
Artist György Kepes designed fifteen Plexiglas chandeliers for the Röhm and Haas building lobbies. Röhm and Haas Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation, photo by Charles Locke © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
Röhm and Haas’s prominent site had clear sight lines to the colonial landmark, Independence Hall, on the lower left. Courtesy of Science History Institute, Röhm and Haas Company Archives.
FOOTNOTES:
3.Meeting minutes dated 12 June 1962, referring to Pietro Belluschi: ‘He said that somehow the scale of Independence Hall should be introduced into the tower.’ Design meeting with Dean Pietro Belluschi, Alexander Ewing, Martin Gordon, and Alexander Toland (last three of the George M. Ewing Co.) at MIT, p.1. Belluschi Collection, Syracuse University, Special Collections Research Center.
4. Memo, Alec Ewing to Andy Jarvis, p.2.
5.Architectural Record, vol.139, January 1966, pp.141–48.
Grace Ong Yan is an architectural historian, educator, and designer whose scholarship explores alternate theories of modernism, and intersections of business, media, and the built environment. She is currently Assistant Professor in Interior Design at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. from in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, M.Arch. from Yale University, and B.Arch. at the University of Texas at Austin.
Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture was published in October 2020 by Lund Humphries, You can find it here .
