Architectural Logo Creep

[Mings]

Even the Adidas HQ has three stripes....

New Adidas HQ

[DrJack]

Their American Headquarters in Portland has some prominent stripes as well:

Adidas America

[BBTV]

As a skyscraper / cityscape geek, I'm not sure that there are many things in this world that I hate more than logos / advertisements on otherwise iconic buildings. I don't want my photos / sketches to provide free advertising to anyone.

For example, look at the Pittsburgh skyline - the USX tower has a big UPMC ad on it, the Mellon building has it's logo lit up really bright, and Federated and Freemarkets also put their wordmarks on those buildings.

Fortunately, Philadelphia hasn't fallen victim to this... yet. The DiBona building has a Blue Cross / Blue Shield logo on it, but it's not lit up at night. The design for the American Commerce Center doesn't really allow for any logos to be placed on it, so that's also positive. While in construction, there was a rendering of the Comcast Center floating around that showed the Comcast logo on the crown, but fortunately that was just for promo materials.

[logoman]

I may be wrong - and please feel free to say so - but it seems to me that this is exactly how a building that houses adidas should look. The company has always had three stripes as it's identity and it seems the architect would be a complete moron if he chose not to include this into his design. A true logo creep here would be if the architect worked his logo into the design.Of course, adidas probably asked for this, but I would imagine this would be exactly the kind of thing a designer or architect would want to include.