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A popular saying, widely but not definitively attributed to Elvis Costello, holds that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” In addition to skewering music critics — a perennial punching bag — this joke asserts the ultimate integrity of each individual art form. What is expressed in one medium, the logic goes, you cannot translate into another.
Album art presents an interesting challenge to Costello’s formalist maxim. While a sleeve design cannot really tell you what the music inside sounds like, it can become a part of the total work, bringing a visual component to the listening experience. In cases when architecture finds its way onto an album cover, these buildings also get bound up with the music. When this is pulled off effectively, music and architecture can speak to each other in intriguing ways.
As we put together this list, we did a good amount of dancing about architecture, or at least tapping our feet while considering the subtle, sometimes ingenious ways musicians have played with architectural iconography over the years. What follows are just 15 examples of memorable album covers featuring architecture. This is far from a complete list, so please share your own examples in the comments.
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星星：北方（2012）
Regular readers of Architizer know how much we loveMoshe Safdie’sHabitat 67 housing complex. When it was unveiled at Expo 67 in Montreal, Safdie’s arrangement of 354 identical prefabricated concrete housing units presented a challenging and original vision for the future of urban living. In one way, Habitat 67 represents an attempt to use principles of musical composition in architectural design. Like a great musician, Safdie creates a sense of liveliness and vitality within a framework built on repetition.
The photograph of Habitat 67 the indie pop band Stars selected for the cover of their 2012 album “The North” is washed out and saturated to create a nostalgic, technicolor effect, which differs in important ways from how the raw concrete of Safdie’s building appears in person. The aerial point of view highlights umbrellas and other indications of domestic life on the roof terraces, making the cover more of amise-en-scènethan an architectural portrait. Overall, the sunny utopianism of this album cover perfectly matches the wistful pop music inside. A bit saccharine, perhaps, but it hits the spot on a bright summer day.
The Velvet Underground: Squeeze (1973)
“Squeeze” is a footnote in the annals of music history. Although it was released under the legendary imprimatur of the Velvet Underground, it only features one member of the actual group: Doug Yule, a multi-instrumentalist who didn’t join the group until after the release of their second album. The resulting work, “Squeeze,” found little commercial or critical success. Unlike the canonical Velvet Underground albums, this one is largely free of conflict, irony or venom, as if someone hadsqueezedthe life out of the band.
一个高点“挤压”是专辑封面。该插图类似地，风格上，到了天鹅绒'1970专辑的封面，“装了，” which depicted pink smoke emanating from a New York City subway stairwell. Symbolically, though, the imagery could not be any more different. No longer an emanation from “underground,” “Squeeze” announces itself as a beacon from the heavens, grabbing New York City by the neck, i.e., the Empire State Building. The hand pictured could belong to Yule, as if, against all odds, he has taken hold of the band — and he isn’t letting go.
2011年，加拿大乐队Azari＆III在“挤压”的图像上，为他们的自我标题的亮相专辑。巨型孤独的手在他们的插图中抓住了Burj Khalifa, an icon of power and prosperity in the era of globalization. Referencing “Squeeze” in a debut was an interesting choice on the part of Azari & III, given the album’s ambivalent reputation. Good design, however, is good design, and this album cover is every bit as striking as its predecessor. There is something eerie about the manicured hand in this image: Its loose grip somehow seems more menacing than the squeezed fist on the Velvets’ cover.
Meat Loaf: Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell (1993)
To love Meat Loaf — the food or the recording artist — is to embrace maximalism. Guitars scream, pianos whirl and Meat Loaf howls throughout his sixth album, “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” which consists almost entirely of neo-Wagnerian ballads that reach for all the highs of popular music while stubbornly refusing any of the lows. Like a well-salted homemade foodstuff, the album leaves listeners feeling exhausted, oddly greasy and craving a glass of water. It’s much more American than apple pie; it’s as American as Oreos.
The cover image, created by the sci-fi/fantasy illustrator Michael Whelan, features a gigantic bat perched atop the Chrysler Building holding an innocent Valkyrie hostage. Luckily, the monster is about to meet his match in the form of a flaxen-haired hero who rides a flying motorcycle and clutches a ball of light. Like the album itself, the charm of this image lies in its emancipatory shirking of restraint. There is some kinship between Meat Loaf’s aesthetic and that of the Chrysler Building, that jewel of the Manhattan skyline that embraces decoration for its own sake. In architecture, like life, we often look for balance, restraint and utility. Other times, however, it’s best to “just pray to the Gods of Sex and Drums and Rock and Roll,” as Meat Loaf understands so well.
德雷克：意见（2016年）
加拿大喜欢德雷克，甚至超过世界其他地方。那么，忧郁的说唱歌手特色并不令人惊讶CN Tower, a fellow Toronto icon, on the cover of his fourth studio album, “Views.” In this image, Drake can be seen sitting atop the CN Tower, legs dangling perilously off the edge. The clouds, like Drake’s troubled thoughts, are dark and gray, and like the lukewarm reviews that would follow the album’s release, they loom closely behind him. Indeed, many of the album’s lyrics seem to anticipate the rapper’s imminent fall from critical grace. In the single “Hotline Bling,” Drake grasps nostalgically, even pathetically, at a memory of adoration lost, haranguing a woman who “used to call [him] on [her] cell phone.”
If you listen closely, it becomes apparent that what Drake is really getting at with this record is an understanding that change, even banal change, is painful for human beings. The cover’s juxtaposition of his own tiny, fragile corpus with the mighty tower that supports it is an expression of human impermanence, a feeling that is familiar to anyone who spends time contemplating iconic architecture.
未知致命管弦乐队：未知致命管弦乐队（2011）
ThePetrova Gora Monument, which appears on the cover of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s debut album, commemorates 300 Serbs who died resisting the Axis-aligned Ustaše militia during World War II. It stands at the highest peak of Petrova Gora, a mountain range in present-day Croatia. The monument, which was designed byVojin Bakić和在1981年完成,现在站在di的状态srepair. The museum inside is no longer operational, and many of the planks that make up the stainless steel façade have been stolen. Nevertheless, there is a kind of quiet, albeit awkward dignity to this futuristic Soviet-era structure that no amount of vandalism can strip away. Standing alone in the countryside, the monument does not immediately announce its purpose, lending it an otherworldly air.
The alien quality of the structure is what recommended it to Unknown Mortal Orchestra, an American and New Zealand psychedelic rock band that likes to cultivate a sense of mystery itself. “I liked the idea of this mysterious building that you don’t know what it is or where it is, but it’s from the past, built for the future, and is now in disrepair,” explained band member Ruban Nielson. “It seemed to match the music, so we used an image of that that looked like a tourist photo.”
适度的鼠标：寂寞拥挤的西部（1997）
适度的鼠标是美国对射线的回答：一个诙谐，敏锐的，有时偏执的团体在我们高度商品，媒体饱和的社会中召集空虚和不满人的空虚和不满人。“寂寞拥挤的西方，”乐队的第二个全长，更暗，在某种程度上比将来的更好的销售专辑更抛签，但在本报记者的卑微观点中，这是迄今为止他们最大的成就。除了我所知的任何其他艺术品，这张专辑捕获了通过农村农村的长驾驶员发现的开放感，一种矛盾地令人兴奋和破碎的感觉。
专辑套筒上的照片，拟合，取自车窗的低有远同点。这些图像中捕获的建筑物是塔的塔西雅图威斯汀: cylindrical, international style affairs erected in 1969. Posed against a purple evening sky and nestled within a black frame, these towers take on an effect of impossible distance on the album cover. We relate to them in the same way atruck driverrelates to the many cities he passes through before arriving at his destination.
Nas: Illmatic (1994)
One of the most iconic album covers of all time, the sleeve for Nas’s “Illmatic” features a semi-transparent childhood portrait of the rapper superimposed over an image of a New York City block. The child and the social environment that formed him are thus depicted as totally entwined, a fact with important resonance given the harrowing vision of urban life Nas presents in his songs.
对于专辑封面而言，NAS非常刻意在七岁时选择自己的照片。“那是我开始承认一切[周围]的一年，”他在1994年的采访中解释道。“这是一年的一切。那是我开始为自己看到未来的那一年并做正确的事情。贫民区让你思考。这个世界是属于我们的。我曾经认为我不能离开我的项目。必发365最新登陆网址我曾经思考过，如果我离开了，如果发生任何事情发生了什么，我以为这将是没有正义，或者我只是一个死奴或什么。该项目曾必发365最新登陆网址经是我的世界，直到我教育自己，看看那里更多。“
Since its release, this album cover concept has been subject to numerous parodies andappropriations. None of this, however, has blunted the power of the original. Like any iconic image, this one has seeped into the very fabric of our culture.
Mazzy Star: She Hangs Brightly (1990)
除了在有史以来最令人难忘的建筑专辑之外，Mazzy Star的首次亮相专辑，“她明亮地挂着，”是因为曾经记录过的最好的专辑之一。前两个曲目，“哈拉“ 和 ”Blue Flower” rank with the most poignant, perfectly balanced love songs in history, mixing the incomparable, languid vocals of Hope Sandoval with the psychedelic guitar work of Dave Roback. Even Kurt Cobain listed this as one of his top 50 albums of all time.
专辑封面是一样优雅的音乐inside, featuring a photograph of the interior of the Art Nouveau泰塞尔酒店in Brussels. There is something about the 1990s that seems to gel with Art Nouveau aesthetics. Perhaps it was our own Belle Époque. Seriously, though, if you have not heard this album yet, please head to your nearest Spotify immediately to rectify that situation. Better yet, do what I did and purchase it on180 gram vinyl.You will not be disappointed, but you might cry. A lot.
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Yes: Going for the One (1977)
The Century Plaza Towers in Los Angeles were designed byMinoru Yamasaki., the architect best known for designing the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Like the Twin Towers, the Century Plaza Towers follow Yamasaki’s “New Formalist” principles and are thus marked by strict symmetry and an understated, classical sense of grandeur. Unlike the Twin Towers, these buildings have a unique, triangular footprint, a fact that can be somewhat unsettling to visitors accustomed to rectangular buildings.
The slightly jarring, angular effect of these buildings is exaggerated in the cubist rendition of the towers featured on the cover of Yes’s eighth studio album, “Going for the One.” The nude man in the foreground of this image is facing an impossible scene, a mess of jutting, intersecting planes that feels like something out of Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York.” The image almost seems to echo Yes’s songwriting method, which some critics at the time compared to a “kitchen sink” in which multiple elements were thrown together haphazardly, without being successfully integrated. Perhaps Yes intended this cover to be a commentary on this criticism of the band. In any case, the image is appealing in itself, a winning composition of blue, orange and white that even Yamasaki could appreciate.
Weezer: Pinkerton (1996)
西方人倾向于看到日本浪漫化d lens, a tradition that stretches from Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madame Butterfly” to the most recent season of HBO’s “Girls,” in which Shoshana, a character played by Zosia Mamet working abroad in Japan, mentions to a friend that she loves the country so much she sometimes worries that she “made it up.” Weezer picked up this theme in their 1996 album “Pinkerton,” a loose concept album based on “Madame Butterfly” that focuses on the way idealism leads to despair. In songs like “Why Bother?” and “Pink Triangle,” singer Rivers Cuomo confronts the fact that he finds himself heartbroken every time he gets his hopes up.
在整个专辑中，由Weezer的标准深黑色，是日本的一个想法，作为纯真，想象力和理想化，无法进入的外流。专辑封面具有19世纪的伍德布洛克图黎明秀叫“kambara的夜雪”。在背景中的传统日本房屋，雪地覆盖的屋顶，现在是日本村庄的风景如画的形象。这种形象的宁静与专辑第一赛道的嘈杂开放之间的对比，“厌倦了性，”幻想与现实之间的海湾回应了这张专辑探讨了这么令人难忘。
对于西方浪漫化亚洲文化的批判性，查看爱德华表示的标志标准1978本书“东方主义，” in which he explores how these types of attitudes are connected to the legacy of colonialism.
磁场：明天的房子（1992）
This is the only entry on the list with a title better suited to an architecture exhibit than an album. An EP, this record clocks in at only 12:21 but contains some of the Magnetic Fields’ best songs, including “Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring.” Both the title of this EP and its cover art — a colorized photograph of the1904年圣路易斯世界公平— reference the utopianism of the early 20th century, a time when the future was contemplated with hope rather than dread and an architectural exhibition could keep the press busy for weeks.
The subtitle of the EP is “five loop songs,” pointing to the fact that each of the tracks consists of a single, repeated loop. Like a designer of modular homes, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Stephin Merritt is keen to show off how much he can do with absolutely minimal component parts. The utopianism in the title stands in ironic contrast to the sardonic, frankly depressed content of the songs. Sample lyric: “Every time you feel wonderful, baby, I feel bad / Either I don’t love you or you don’t love me, oh yeah.”
Sufjan Stevens: Illinois (2005)
The second entry in Sufjan Stevens’ quixotic, possibly ironic “50 states” series, in which Stevens promised to create a concept album for each united state, “Illinois” is one of the most ambitious works of the aughts. In nearly every song, Stevens walks a razor-thin line between whimsy and heartbreak, nestling devastating songs like “Casimir Pulaski Day” and “John Wayne Gacy” within an overall conceptual framework that involves children’s choirs and song titles like “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhh!” During the tour for the album, Stevens would wear a boy scout uniform and butterfly wings onstage. Stevens’ ambition to fuse an appreciation for kitsch Americana with a respectful interest in the lives of ordinary Americans is something few others would have thought of and even fewer could have pulled off with any sort of success.
这张专辑的封面sensibili相符ty perfectly. A crowded, mural-like portrait featuring the Chicago skyline, UFOs, Al Capone and a goat, this image reflects an image of Illinois as a land suffused with folklore. One of the strongest aspects of the illustration is the irregular, felt-tip rendition of Chicago’s skyscrapers. Rendering these awesome towers in an amateurish hand makes them appear folksy and familiar, reminding us that these buildings form the backdrop of Chicagoans’ lives. “I was in love with the place,” Sufjan sings of America’s first city of architecture, “in my mind.”
有趣的事实：原始专辑袖子特色超人的形象。这在史蒂文斯的标签哮喘猫咪之后在随后的印刷中删除了意识到以这种方式使用超人的形象构成了版权侵权。
Pink Floyd: Animals (1977)
松散地基于乔治奥韦尔的经典的中文Animal Farm, Pink Floyd’s “Animals” depicts class society as various types of animals: sheep, dogs, pigs and “Pigs on the Wing。“在梦幻般的和令人沮丧的时候，“动物”是一个乐队的产品，没有什么可以证明，他们能够放弃分心并专注于制作一个完全符合他们愿景的工作。封面上的照片具有Batterea发电站in West London. Something about the composition makes it look impossibly enormous, an impenetrable fortress of industrialism reminiscent of the Ministry buildings in Michael Radford’s film adaptation of “1984.” The icy structure is offset a bit by the whimsical image of a flying pig.
Fun fact: The original plan for the album art included a giant, pig-shaped helium balloon. The idea was to take a photograph of the power station with the pig floating in front of it. Unfortunately, on the day of shooting, the helium balloon escaped. The pig flew through Heathrow airspace, forcing the cancellation of flights and eventually landed in a nearby farm, ironically frightening a flock of sheep. Because the balloon plan failed, the image of the pig that appears on the album sleeve was simply superimposed on a photo of the factory.
Baio: The Names (2015)
Baio is the stage name of Chris Baio, the bassist of Vampire Weekend, a band comprised of Columbia University alumni that stormed into the public consciousness in 2007 with a set of catchy, Afrobeat-inflected songs about Cape Cod and Oxford commas. Baio’s debut solo album, “The Names,” takes its title from a Don DeLillo novel, following in the proud Vampire Weekend tradition of having good taste. Baio’s sophistication is seen most markedly in the sleeve for “The Names,” which features a photograph byMatthias Heinrich在汉堡的建筑物。
“I came across him on design blog about five years ago,” Baio said of Heinrich in an interview with空间。“To return to that idea of estrangement, Matthias takes pictures in Berlin and Hamburg — where the one I used for the album artwork was shot — and my experiences of those cities have always been extremely grey, so to see insanely colorful photos taken there fascinated me.”
As the interview continued, Baio came around to the subject of the font featured on the sleeve. “[This] is from the opening sequence of the Ingmar Bergman film, ‘Persona,’”他解释道。“这可能是我最喜欢的五分钟电影。”设计粉丝应该很乐意了解克里斯巴奥是他们自己的一个。这个高雅的亮相的歌曲并没有受到伤害，这是专辑艺术的传染性。“Sister of Pearl“去年夏天发布的时候，我的脑袋里陷入了良好的一周。
威尔科：富尔科特·埃克斯特酒店（2002年）
The story of Wilco’s fourth album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” is told time and again. Completed in early 2001, Wilco’s label, Reprise Records of Warner Music Group, originally refused to release it, believing the art rock production was too experimental to appeal to a mainstream audience. In response, Wilco pulled out of their contract and decided to stream the album on their website for free, a pioneering move in these early days of file sharing. Eventually, Wilco was able to arrange for the official release of their album through Nonesuch Records, a different Warner imprint, in April 2002.
Streaming of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” began on September 18, 2001, just one week after the attacks of September 11, which happened to have been the original scheduled release date of the album. Fans immediately made connections between the album’s artwork — which features the two towers ofMarina Cityin Wilco’s hometown of Chicago — and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Furthermore, lyrics such as“高楼摇晃/声音逃生”和“战争战争”的歌曲标题提醒听众的攻击。虽然巧合，但这些联系都是对听众的痛苦，他将专辑解释为在不确定时期的生活中的冥想。
The album’s sparse production — which features a generous amount of radio static — and abstract lyrics all contribute a mood of vulnerability almost anyone can relate to. In this context, the elegant towers on the cover take on a more intimate meaning. Like us, they look lost, framed only by a blank insensate sky. “Oh distance has no way,” Jeff Tweedy sings, “of making love understandable.”
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