week three_article four_blog ten

Gail Faurschou_Obsolescence and Desire: Fashion and Commodity Form

“…it is not the method of selection, much less the specific products themselves that need concern us anymore-only the label they will bear.”
-Faurschou

This is the power o f the brand name, of the label in contemporary culture. Increasingly, labels and brands have come to carry associated values, status, prestige, meaning and ideologies which are packaged and contained within a name, rather than the product the name is stamped on. There are many examples that this is the case. Timex vs. Rolex, Cavalier vs. Corvette, Fruit of the Loom vs. Calvin Klein; each of these names elicits different responses and raises different preconceived notions within us. Increasingly, every brand-name in contemporary culture has an entire existence associated with it; a parallel universe as Faurschou would call it. Consumers, by purchasing products showcasing different labels, are attempting to define their own existence, identities, ideologies, values, meanings and status via the mechanism of the brand. Has architecture not become a branded commodity? Consider the ‘big names’ in architecture at this time: Eisenmann, Ghery, Koolhaas, Tschumi et. al. What are these names if not brand names? Are clients (cities, individuals, organizations, and the like) now, more than ever purchasing an architectural brand? “Well of course the new museum is magnificent; it is a Gehry after all.” Is architecture simply a given ideology, a certain aesthetic which is to be consumed? Is this our new role as architects? As cultural producers? To simply be another of the perpetually changing hottest brands? Can we even avoid becoming branded in a contemporary culture which sees and refers to everything around it as commodity? Is everything ‘new’ within contemporary culture inherently and immediately taken in, consumed, and regurgitated shortly thereafter? Why does it so often feel that such consumption is inevitable, uncontrollable even? Is there a way for architecture and other modes of cultural production to combat their own consumption as commodities? Could there even be a way to subvert the brand name, the label, to our use as designers?