Branding’s origins began during pre-industrial times as a means to indicate the origin of the object or identify the maker of the good. With the onset of the industrial revolution, those brands began to morph into more than a maker’s mark and emerged as an icon that represents more than just a logo, they embody complex personalities. The industrial revolution also created capitalism which began to transform the notion of brand. Economic structures and marketing strategies have seized the opportunity to motivate brand recognition as a powerful tool to generate more capital. Departing from serving as an identifier of the maker, branding has recently expanded into larger territories, namely architecture.
This graduate seminar will investigate the intimate relationship that has developed between architectural discipline, architecture as an object
and architecture as a vector for capitalistic agendas surrounding branding.
In Four Parts, conversation, research, analysis, and synthesis the semester’s efforts will investigate the typological relationships between branding and architecture and seek to uncover latent potentials between cross disciplinary practices. The culmination of work will be formatted into a pamphlet as a cohesive body of research that will reveal a new understanding of the inherent relationships between architecture, branding + capitalism.