Green Architectural Branding

PNC came up with probably the most innovative architectural branding idea I have tumbled on during the last year. Please welcome the largest living wall in North America, as posted on Jetson Green.

In a recent press release, PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC) announced plans to install a 2,380 square-foot, soil-based living wall on the southerly exterior of the company's Pittsburgh headquarters building, One PNC Plaza.

The living wall, pending municipal approval and installation in September 2009, will be the largest green living wall in North America. Produced by Green Living Technologies and designed by Mingo Design, a careful arrangement of locally-sourced plants will brand the building with PNC's logo.

PNC will have the 24-ton wall mounted directly onto One PNC Plaza with a panel system and stainless steel bracketing. The irrigation system -- which is estimated to require only 15 minutes of watering per week -- is built into 602 panels of soil-based growth medium.

Architectural Branding - The future

Architectural Branding has become the new buzz word of the architectural industry during the last decades and rightfully so, since architecture becomes an expression of the newly developed experiential brands. So, for those of you that never pictured architecture walking hand n hand with marketing… well… think again.Despite our increasingly virtual world, we still need physical buildings to establish personal relationships with brands and architecture plays a vital role in this equation by not only confine customer experience, but also define it.
Architectural branding adds significant value when the building is in line with the other aspects of branding, making the overall effect greater than the sum of its parts.

Architecture—the exterior design of buildings—has to, and can, mirror brand values such as high-tech orientation, openness, competitiveness, sportiness, etc. These are in a way timeless, says Gernot Brauer, editor of Architecture as Brand Communication: Dynaform + Cube.One thing is for sure, the use of architecture to complement brand personality will only become stronger during the following years.