Billboard-Building
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- NORM for the Architectural Association, 2009
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Our inquiry investigates billboards as what we would call “large-scale-building-sized-graphic-design.” Billboards are one of the few surfaces that are both architectural and graphic.
According to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, in Learning from Las Vegas (1977), two modes of architectural communication co-exist: “decorated shed” vs. “duck” [fig.1]. In both instances the assumption is that the visible elements (“decoration” or “duck”) indicate to the viewer the function and meaning of the architectural object.
A third typology of “Billboard Building” can be added to these classifications. But for this type, the decoration is a form of communication in its own right, independent of the underlying architecture. In this context it is no longer about what the building represents, but what is represented on the building.
A “Billboard Building” is a three dimensional structure with the purpose of giving space to a big sign. There are two types of “Billboard Buildings”; (A) the pure billboard, whose only purpose is communication [fig.2+3] and (B) buildings which, for one reason or another, have become a Big Sign [fig.4].
We once heard that along highways in India there are large-scale billboards that are illuminated at night. These billboards are mounted on hollow steel columns approximately three meters in diameter. The bulbs that light them are so expensive that guards must be hired to protect them. Guards are offered free accommodation inside the billboard scaffolding in exchange for protecting the bulbs. This strange combination of uses suddenly gives a function to billboard type A [fig.5].
Here, we will also mention Potemkin Villages – the allegedly fake settlements erected at the behest of Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin [fig.6] to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to this story, Potemkin, who led the Crimean military campaign, had hollow façades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of her new conquests. Potemkin villages are nothing but billboards that look as if they were buildings. Perhaps they are similar to type B, or something else altogether [fig.7+8].
