Perhaps the most frequent question heard by the executives at Sid Lee (besides “Are you hiring? Please?”) is this: “What the hell is up with the architecture part of your business?”
It’s a source of fascination and frustration for rival agencies, so it was fitting that the Montreal-based creative shop revealed plenty about their architecture division the second day of New York’s Creative Week during an hour-long session titled “Branding Meet Architecture.”
When asked “Why the expansion into architecture?” straightway by moderator Robert Klara (a staff writer at Ad Week), Eric Alper, vice-president of strategy, went cheeky.
“If you are to succeed in Montreal, and want to do more than translation work for the rest of Canada or Chinese food restaurants, you have to differentiate,” Alper said.
Martin Leblanc, an architect at Sid Lee Architecture, then laid it out for the audience: products and physical spaces are the ultimate storytelling venues.
“Architecture is a powerful tool to carry emotion and information, so as such, it’s as powerful as any other tools as branding people will need for sales.”
Alper then went on to hammer the unrepentant theme so far at Creative Week: few people notice ads anymore, so agencies need to find new ways to connect. “If I get people into a physical space, they’re going to spend longer than 30 seconds. They’re going to spend 300 seconds or 3,000 seconds.”
He then offered some first steps for retailers looking to have impact by way of space design.
“When your purpose as a company is clear, what you deliver is clear. Don’t focus on the hardware”—how high the shelving is or what to hide in the storage room—“but software. Your challenge as a marketer and retailer is defining that purpose… that software.”
The two then outlined Sid Lee Architecture’s most notable projects. Of Bota Bota, their spa on the St. Lawrence, they said that by embracing the industrial location, they were able to “listen to what was already there.” As a result the design had an anchor and a direction.
Their work on designing European soccer club Ajax’s museum had the fan’s core needs at the heart of its brief.
“We tell stories through space,” said Alper. “We’re all storytellers. Once you establish this, the relationship between architects, industrial designers, and writers becomes more fluid.”
See? Easy peasy. Now you really don’t have an excuse to not have your own architecture division.
