Connection: Capturing Attentions

Connection: Frank Gehry and Car Commercials?

As a car guy who spends many hours into watching and paying attention to different parts of automotive news and new technology, I have to admit that the post-modernism examples that we learned in class caught my attention the most.  To be more specific, the car commercials helped me the most when I had trouble understanding the main ideas that distinguish post-modernism from modernism.  From my experiences, car commercials tend to emphasize the cars' main-focused character such as performance-oriented or affordability and tries to focus on certain age group as well as more broad group of buyers at the same time.  In order to do that, they've used a variety of different styles of backgrounds and way of displaying their product.  The two commercials that come up to my mind as great examples are the Cadillac and Chrysler Commercials.  As for Cadillac, they used the phrase "let's dance" and an "art and science design" when they were trying to change the brand's image from old man's car to more performance oriented luxury vehicle.  On the other hand, Chrysler used "imported from Detroit" phrase, displayed the images of different parts of Detroit, and emphasized the quality.

In today's commercials, I feel like each commercials are distinguishable and has a unique aspect that grabs the viewers' attention in a different way.  From this idea, I felt a great connection between Frank Gehry's work of architecture and his unique style to today's car commercials.  What I've noticed from his work while we watched a documentary about him was that he uses these techniques and styles that might seem weird at first.  However, this, what might seem weird, is totally new in that no one else uses it and in addition, it is purposeful at the same time.  To be more clear, the design seems like it was only focused on the aesthetic beauty and imagination of the designer.  However, it also accounts for the purpose of the building such as lighting, openness, and the flow of the materials.  What amazed me the most was designing the architecture and making it come alive in real life.  It must have taken great amount of details and careful construction since it doesn't just have square corners or round corners in everyside of the building.  I think that the uniqueness and the quality are the two most important parts that sets it apart from others.