When surface has more value than volume

Geneva's new ad frenziness A picture I took yesterday morning in Geneva. It shows an interesting (and sad) trend lately in the city: the disappearing of mom and pop's shop which are now so expensive to rent that it's more valuable for certain luxury companies to use the shop as a billboard structure. In the case depicted above, the former DIY shop on the right has been turned into a billboard for a watch company (but of course some cool graffiti-makers attacked it). The portuguese restaurant showed on the foreground (left) has also recently been turned into this kind of surface: the wooden structure will soon be covered by crappy watch ads.

In the end, we have an empty volume with this super-expensive surface.

Why do I blog this? this quick thought ("surface more valued than volume") while walking around there yesterday led me to think about how spatiality is a complex issue. It's kind of weird to think about this sort of practice.