Volkswagen has been running a new series of tv ads all set in the driveway of a peculiar modern house. Aside from the talking cars being unusual the house has garage doors all the way across the front. But if you look closely behind the garage doors you'll notice that the house appears to be an iconic modern Eichler house. This is confirmed later in the spot when the car rolling down the street passes a never ending line of Eichler modern ranch houses.
So what gives? What kind of message is Volkswagen trying to send? Why not show their cars in front of ordinary McMasiony like houses since that's what most of their customers have anyway? Right? But no, instead they show their cars in front of perhaps the most iconic of modern homes, the Eichlers. Why would that be? Well, we all know that Volkswagon wants their cars to come across as smart, modern, and desirable. And so they want to place them in a setting that reinforces that. If they put them in front of an ordinary house, then their car would look, well... ordinary. So instead they put their cars in front of a house that looks cool, and that makes their cars look cool. And they rightly assume that everybody out there in TV land is going to understand that. They get the message that the car in front of the cool house is also cool. So then since we all understand that the modern house is cool, WHY CAN"T YOU GO OUT TO ANY PLACE IN THE COUNTRY WHERE HOUSES ARE BEING SOLD AND BUY A MODERN HOUSE? Because the idiots that build and sell the houses are the few people in the country that don't get it. Dopes.
A shout out to Robert McLaughlin for spotting this one.
What about the strange cube modern house in the Audi A3 gallery ads?
ReplyDeleteYou can see it in a recent Photoshopdisasters blog titled Audi: Will This Do?
Do you have a direct link for me?
ReplyDeletesometimes URLs don't work on these blogs -
ReplyDeletephotoshopdisasters. blogspot. com /2009/06/ audi-will-this-do. html
(take out spaces)
Ahh - I see it now. Thats the Loft Cube - a german proposal to place these small dwellings on the roof of urban buildings.
ReplyDeleteYou got some spaces mixed in that url:
http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2009/06/audi-will-this-do.html
I have never been able to post full URLs on blogspot - what is the trick?
ReplyDeleteanyway - great idea for an architectural blog! The whole concept of "acceptance" of modern design & architecture has always been a challenging issue.
I don't know? I just pasted it in. It would be nice if blogger automagically made them into links, like everybody else in the world... oh well.
ReplyDeleteWhich types you are exploring???
ReplyDeleteThanks
Allvira
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modern kids furniture