by Douglas E. Gordon, Hon. AIA
Executive Editor

Summary: As a thesis project at Iowa State, Nate Klinge, Assoc. AIA, and Brad Baer, Assoc. AIA, devised a schema for conveying a corporation’s brand through the total design of a building’s operations. The architectural medium is their message, and it’s extra-extra large. As their example, the designers chose Sara Lee.

The primary study for their project thesis—say both Klinge, now working with Architects Schipper Kastner, and Baer, now with Kieran Timberlake—was focused on function. When asked how this project contributed to his real-world architectural abilities, Baer said: “I learned design starts far from the building. We were investigating packaging and corporate image. We were formulating ideas for so long that when we began the design, it was a snap, relatively speaking.”

The concept they came up with is really generic, they say. “As is the case of many large-scale companies, a social façade is established to exemplify a desired image of the company to the consumer,” says Klinge.

“The designer must be intimately familiar with client operations,” he says. “We were at first interested in how a façade screening system might work and how we might improve business through architecture.”

“We were able to investigate how the corporation might identify itself with regard to its image,” Baer expounds. “The building form we chose was what one might typically find in Chicago, since we weren’t able to get out there to actually visit the Sara Lee headquarters.”

“Brad investigated the Sara Lee Corporation at a large scale, and I investigated a local street cart business at a small scale,” Klinge says. “Our findings suggested that the success of both businesses stemmed from the intermediate or ‘medium’ spaces within each company’s structure. Extra-Extra-Medium (XXM) was a hybrid of these two studies, which speculated that a company could benefit from taking advantage of more than one business scale; hence the combination of street carts working parallel within the boundary of a larger company’s practice.”

Here, from a thesis project that received an A, is the project description.

Not constrained to the constituent of any one conglomerate, the marketing methodology used in this study can be applied to nearly any industry. Using the Sara Lee Corporation solely as a representative, this study examines how an architectural façade can both reveal and conceal a corporate identity.

What if there were a way for a corporation to be candidly and utterly transparent to the public while accurately conveying their desired image—while bolstering sales and minimizing expenses? Could this be accomplished every day without relying on electronic media, newspapers, magazines, or billboards? Imagine the luxury of producing a quality product and allowing a single element of the architecture housing that activity to be the sole ambassador of the company’s real and desired image to the public.

The design brief
From distribution to storage and corporate lounges to a recycling area, all scales of business rely on intermediate (medium) spaces that typically are not exposed. XXM attempts to create a dialogue among the small- and large-scale businesses and benefit the sole institution through the merger of these two extremes; in this case, through exposing the inevitable yet non-celebrated stages of the food industry.

The imagined Sara Lee headquarters, with a 15-foot-deep façade, is arranged on three axes emphasizing different aspects of capital industry. The z-axis displays corporate scale, with the outermost face containing elements of small-scale food distribution such as street vending and transitioning back to large-scale elements of the same variety (i.e., the production facility). The y-axis represents programmatic elements essential for the company to function effectively. And the x-axis is the time, emphasizing the importance of regimental order within modern business. As each stage of the production progresses along the axes, it relies on the completion of the previous stage, much like an assembly line.

The front of the design is covered with 132 suspended Sara Lee vending carts that revolve only along the x-axis. The pattern of rotation throughout the day is such that they conceal and reveal various tasks housed within the structure at a time when it might correspond to that specific activity—cleaning, loading, cooking, etc.

As the carts move among programmatic elements, they receive routine maintenance according to the function of the particular area. When a cart completes its round of programmatic elements, vendors distribute it to the street level where they sell goods to the public.

Three levels of advertising
The façade of each cart advertises on three levels. Individually, the cart is labeled with a portion of an image and a specific word. The various words on the cart provoke different experiential ideas as opposed to advertising the specific Sara Lee brand. Words like “fresh,” “homemade,” and “gourmet” reach out to customers purchasing various items from the vendors.

On a second level, each cart displays a portion of an image, such that when the carts align during their rotation throughout the day, a complete image is distinguishable, much like a puzzle. During the morning, noon, and evening rush hours, groupings of carts align to unveil this secondary image of a Sara Lee product. From bread to cookies, these images snap into focus at the height of customer traffic each day, while at all other times, the images are indiscernible and the façade appears pixilated.

On the large scale, the carts in their entirety work together to act as a billboard, spelling out the name of the company only when the cycle completes. Between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., the façade invites viewers to see the temporary spectacle. And the panels are interchangeable to allow adjustments for holidays or other marketing campaigns.

Introducing a multi-scale operating platform provides any corporation with endless possibilities. Although speculative, XXM is intended to be a functional addition to an existing façade and can fit any context. It provides a given company with a window from the outside in, exposing the hidden elements once thought to be undesirable. This flips on its head the conventional notion of how a corporation should be represented.