Looking back in a time - Advertising building products

Looking back in a time of rapid change

Part 4 Advertising building products

This is the final article where I look back at my 1995 copy of Architecture New Zealand. The glossy image above is on the back page and is advertising Fowler bathroom fittings.

The image shows a very happy women smiley at someone out of the shot with head tilted and shoulder turned in as if to say, "you caught me admiring by bathroom again, but I just love it". In fact she loves her bathroom fittings so much she goes to great effort just to visit it, doing her hair & make-up and putting on earrings and an off the shoulder dress.

Women have been featured in Architecture images for a long time. Photographer Julius Shulman featured female models in his most iconic images from late 40's to early 60's. Images such as Pierre Keonig's Case Study House #22 with two women seated in the fully glazed cantilevered corner of the building with the lights of Los Angeles twinkling through the dark or the women reclining beside the pool of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs.

More recently Urbis magazine went through a stage of including female models in the photo shoots of the houses they featured. These models were a rather an unnecessary distraction from the architecture and left one thinking, what is this magazine really about!

Now don't get me wrong having people included in images of architecture shows what architecture is really about and that is people. We are starting to see architecture images with the clients, their children and even pets being included.

I guess to be fair to the women in the bathroom, this it is about advertising a product so is conveying a feeling to the viewer in order to compel them to buy. Whereas images of buildings with their occupiers help explain how it feels to live, work and play in those building.