How to Brand a Building

Aside from the usual signage, we didn’t set out to brand our building when we first moved into it 13 years ago. But we ended up creating a local architectural icon, starting with a bit of serendipitous fortune and evolving to become more thoughtful in our branding as we progressed.

The Backstory.

We’re a Boise-based advertising and branding firm. Thirteen years ago, we were looking for new digs and found exactly what we were looking for—an art deco building in a gritty neighborhood with lower rent. The building, which was constructed in 1948, began its life as the Borah post office, then went from government service to the golden era of automobiles: it became a car dealership, an auto mechanic shop, and finally an AAMCO transmission shop.

That’s when we took over the building and renovated it with the artful assistance of architects Andy Erstad and Rob Thornton, with a later internal design assist from Dwaine Carver. When we opened for business here, the transformation from transmission shop to ad agency was featured in media ranging from HOW magazine to the Idaho Statesman.

I Love You

We’d been in our building for several years and had plans to put a mural on the south-facing outside wall which fronts Front Street, a five-lane state highway that carries more than 37,000 cars each day. With that traffic, it’s a great place to reach people with creative messages (such as the campaign we did for Woodland Empire Craft Brewing, which you can read about here), but like the son of a cobbler who goes without shoes, we came up with designs but never executed them.

Enter artist Grant Olsen.

Grant’s a friend and turns out he’d had similar ideas about that prominent wall—he, too, wanted to paint a mural on it. He inquired as to our interest; I responded favorably to his pitch; and he set off in search of funding for his public art project. And what was the mural? At that point, I didn’t even know, as I’m a fan of turning artists loose with limited constraints on their creativity.

I didn’t hear from him for about another year.

One day Grant came back, sang an unsuccessful tune of failed public funding, unable to find a private patron as well, so he and I struck a deal to pay for the mural in his head that he wanted to drape across our building exterior

Grant went to work, rented and erected scaffolding, and in three days created the mural, a muscled body builder with the words “I Love You” boldly emblazoned across the bottom.

There’s no way I could have fathomed the response to Grant’s art. It has become an icon in the Boise community. Couples frequently pose to be photographed with it for wedding invites and anniversary celebrations. The local chapter of the American Heart Association has held Valentine’s Day fundraisers with it. Taxi drivers at the airport ask your destination and with a simple flex of the biceps and a mention of just three words, they nod their heads in understanding.

It’s got its own special power. People are especially transfixed by the artwork of the strong man’s stomach muscles, insistent that there’s a hidden image buried within. (Grant Olsen says there isn’t, for the record.)

It’s now referred to by many in the community simply as the “I Love You” Building. Now how cool is that?

The Talisman

So that was pure luck, serendipity, but we took some lessons from the power of public art and applied them to the rest of our building.

We’re located along an alley in what has long been a neighborhood in transition, home to an assortment of characters, urban doings, and prime habitat for graffiti artists. We decided to add art to the alley and with it a bit of protection—a talisman—to our building as well.

We purchased a large bicycle-themed graffiti artwork by Collin Pfeifer and Solomon Hawk Sahlein of Sector Seventeen and had it installed in the alley by artist Michael Cordell and metal fabricator Johnny Weld.  (Yes, Johnny Weld.) The artwork is viewable only through a narrow picture-window view from Grove Street to the north, or if you’re in the alley. It’s an unsuspecting little “find” to those who stumble across it, but it’s also proven to be a string of garlic to the taggers in the neighborhood. Collin and Solomon of Sector Seventeen are highly regarded by all, so I can’t help but think that by embracing and paying homage to graffiti art we have made ourselves less susceptible to freelance graffiti tagging. In our 13 years in the building, we’ve only had one small piece of indiscriminate graffiti painted on our building, and it was pre-Sector Seventeen.

Every Building Tells A Story

The back of our office building opens to a parking lot that’s used by our employees, a print shop, and recently to the employees and customers of a craft brewery. It’s another little pocket we decided to explore with public art, but this time we went with a narrative.

We asked author Alan Heathcock if he’d write a short story we could publish on our back exterior wall. Alan’s a highly regarded writer (check out his award-winning short story collection Volt) and a super-cool guy and he was down with the idea. We next hired Grant Olsen to bring it to life with paint in an editorial fashion on our wall, andStreetlamps was born.

Now this is a small parking lot in an off-the-beaten path location, and the story has become a hidden gem to be discovered. It’s been rewarding to look out our back windows and see people who come across it and see them engage with the art, necks craned, heads and eyes moving left-to-right across the landscape page of our building exterior.

On occasion, they walk in our back door and ask about the story and where they can get a copy of it. We haven’t taken the time to reprint the article for these people (cobbler’s shoes syndrome, I guess), but are now doing so with Alan’s permission, at the end of this blog*.

Lessons in Place Branding

1. If your objective is creating a sense of place, attracting tenants, increasing valuation, or just a love of creativity, public artwork is worth it.
2. Don’t be afraid to give artists some creative license—it’s a risk, but generally a small one, and the reward is far greater than a tightly-scripted, safe-and-sane execution. Probably makes you pucker a bit, and doesn’t work for a public arts installation with government funding, but that’s when you get serendipity.
3. Don’t forget the power of a written message or a narrative. As the social web has reinforced for all of us, images have huge power—but when they are married with words (“I Love You” or a story of love, “Streetlamps.”) they become place changing

What’s Next?

Our building will need a new paint of coat some day. I’ve got it in mind to do a transitional, temporary graffiti installation—the entire building painted by our city’s graffiti artists—that will be paired with a fund-raising event for some worthy cause in our community. After a weekend’s time, it will be erased with a fresh coat of paint. Then we’ll look at publishing a new story from another writer on the back page of our office and a new graffiti installation for the alley.

But the “I LOVE YOU MAN”? We’ll hire Grant Olsen to repaint him detail for detail because he’s magic, and he lives forever.

* STREETLAMPS

Alan Heathcock

He worked hanging power lines across the high desert prairie. Towns bloomed with electric light. From high atop a power pole, outside a town in a valley of trees he heard music. A song from the sky? Whispered from the clouds? He climbed down, let his ears guide him over a hill and into a ravine. A young woman played violin by a tin brown river. He stared out over the roiling current bolstering himself to let her know he found her song beautiful.

“Our world is energy unharnessed,” he told her. “The river’s water electricity, its banks the conduit.” She sat silent, and he was afraid he’d pushed her away like he had everyone else he’d ever known. Violin across her lap, she held her face in her hands and began to cry. She stood and stalked off up the bank, slowing only to glance back at him, urging him to follow. He kept his distance up a steep hill, climbing to a ledge near the peak. She led him into the cool of a cave. They walked until there was no light, then she held his wrist and pulled him deeper still. They passed through a narrow tunnel. The darkness seemed to open. High above, pricks of light sluiced through bird-sized holes eroded in the cavern’s dome.

Here her violin echoed sounding like many, sounding like the entire world had become music. Her song ended on a trill of notes, the last held quivering. They stood against each other in the dark quiet, their hands touching. 

“Songs fade, but remain in the air,” she said. “We breathe them in and they become a part of our skin and hair, our blood. We are a lifetime of songs. We have so many songs inside us.” 

They kissed and he felt, at long last, somebody understood him.