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By Root 608 0

Is a façade a window into the building, is it a reflection of the environment, is it a reflection of the world? But the big word also was, ‘I don’t want it to be commercial. We want it to be soft branding.’ It means you want to talk about the company without mentioning the company every three seconds, and it becoming much more of a reflection of its attitudes and values.” Kennon was telling Van Gastel, a young and extremely hip figure whose hair stood straight up and was only rarely seen in its natural color, to do just what he would do if he weren’t worried about the client’s reactions. Kennon’s aesthetic ambition appeared to coincide with Morgan’s wish to speak from “the heart.”

In January 1999, Kennon, Clement, and Van Gastel met at Kohn Pederson’s offices with the clients—fifteen or so executives from Morgan Stanley, the Rockefeller Center Development Corporation, Tishman Realty, and Hines Development, the worldwide building firm based in Houston. After presentations by the two architects, Van Gastel showed the images he had worked up. “It was a disaster,” recalls Kennon. “Lead balloon is kind of an understatement. After the presentation, there was dead silence. The comment from Morgan Stanley was ‘All of our commercials are basically people in boats. What does this have to do with anything?’” Kennon tried to explain that it was a sign, not a commercial; that he wanted to break the frame, and so on. But the executives liked the frame; they clung to the frame. To them, TV was not a “medium,” but the natural means through which electronic information was consumed. And they didn’t see much evidence of the service-oriented, family-oriented imagery they had in mind. One Morgan official who was at the meeting says that the pictures reminded him of “an MTV short”—abstract and ironic and full of ingenious one-liners. Kennon now concedes, in retrospect, that “It’s very difficult to propose something this creative when you can’t point to something [that already exists] and say, ‘It looks like this.’”

And then there was the old-fashioned issue of money. Kennon and Clement wanted to use an immense amount of LED, and they wanted it to be the highest quality commercially available, which was sixteen-millimeter (the distance separating each cluster of bulbs). The complexity of the program would also require extremely sophisticated hardware. The sign they envisioned would cost in the neighborhood of $20 million to build, and perhaps another $1 million a year to operate. Morgan officials viewed the meeting as a useful starting point; now they began doing some thinking of their own. Could the sign be built more cheaply, using either less LED or a lower quality of image? Could the bank’s own technology staff do the programming? The answer to all questions turned out to be no. After a year or so of research and planning, the bankers, to their credit, not only accepted the architects’ proposal but increased the costs by adding a large vertical panel over the entrance to the building, to be used for showing more conventional, news-oriented imagery. Morgan re-hired Imaginary Forces; this time they had the designers work directly with marketing and communications officials from the bank.

The programming that the designers devised satisfied Morgan’s concern about image without deviating very far from the original presentation. Van Gastel created six five-minute “themes,” all of them meant to evoke the identity Jarrett and others described without turning the building into a commercial. Some of the imagery was nevertheless fairly direct and literal-minded. The “Aspiration” theme consisted of words and images demonstrating “how Morgan Stanley facilitates dreams,” projected over pictures of people representing customers. There was an atmospheric theme, designed to use the building as a sort of giant mood ring: in the morning, images of sunrise; in the evening, of the moon. But Van Gastel never lost sight of Kennon’s directive to rethink the meaning of “façade.” The “X-Ray” theme turned the building into a transparency: after a blueprint of one