Signs And Buildings

[Subdude]

The Futures of Architecture

Why buildings smothered in signs are actually good for the profession.

By Philip Nobel

Posted December 20, 2004

Jet packs and flying cars notwithstanding, when we think of the future we think of architecture. From the long lines of skyscrapers laden with iron skyways and dirigible docks imagined for New York City to the streamlined highway-and-glass-tower utopias proposed (and sometimes built) since the 1960s, the world to come has long been described in the language of buildings. In more recent visions, however, architecture has had a formidable rival in representing the face of the future: advertising.

Here, of course, we return once again to the still reigning benchmark image of where, as a physical culture, we have long been heading. Each year the world of Blade Runner becomes less of a speculative proposition--less in the mind and more in your face. Until I went to Tokyo in the early 1990s, I thought it was just an intriguing possibility: a city so overcome with brilliant advertising that the voice of its architecture is completely drowned out. But while Times Square was still a study in rickety neon and floodlit posters--the zipper wrapping the little tower at the southern crux of the square the only nod to fleeter technologies--Tokyo was already well on its way to becoming Ridley Scott

[MidtownCoog]

drivel