White walls
Category
Architecture / Real Estate Management
Services
Architectural design | Color consulting | Signage | Photography | Social media | PR + media relations
Paint a building rainbow colors, nobody bats an eye
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Paint a building white, everybody loses their minds
Paint a building white, everybody loses their minds
Cities all over Central and Eastern Europe share a similar landscape feature — socialist panel buildings, remnants of centrally-planned urban development. Most of them were built around the 1970’s , with a focus on efficiency and speed over quality and longevity, springing up in large concentrated developments and filling empty plots in neighborhoods. In the eyes of many, they are an unwelcome monument to a dehumanizing system, a thing to hide or disguise, often with peculiar, multicolored designs.
In 2017 a local housing cooperative reached out to us to help them select colors for their building, which was undergoing a typical procedure for these types of structures — exterior insulation combined with a fresh coat of plaster. We took it a step further and went with a pearly white base and simple design, focused on elevating the rhythm of the symmetrical facade. Two tones, a crisp pattern and a strategic use of typography made the end result elegant and noticeably fresh.
When the scaffolding came down, the reaction we got was beyond our wildest dreams. It turns out we touched on an issue that has been irking many, many people. Our first facade project received a lot of media attention and even landed us a couple awards. It prompted more real estate managers to approach us with similar projects, making facade redesigns one of our most popular services.
