Brent Toderian was leading a group of Copenhagen architects and planners around Vancouver last week (on bicycles, of course), tweeting along the way. Here’s one of his much-retweeted quotes:
Most frequent comment so far: Too much of same materials/colours. Told them I strongly agree. “You should send your architects traveling!” Ouch.
And one of the places our designers should travel to is Brisbane, Australia. None of them will say ouch after surveying Brizzy architecture – at least when it comes to colour. They do it, um, brilliantly.
Here are some images taken this last week of Brisbane’s colour palette – a subject I explored in this Price Tags.
A decade or so before Vancouver adventurously tried introducing a strip of colour (partly in reaction to rising complaints of our monotous palette), Brisbane was getting edgy:
.
Sometimes it’s just a small gesture of colour than can transform the composition:
.
There then there’s the use of solid planes – eye-catching but not ostentatious – that help reinforce the architecture:
.
These days, Brisbane architects are just colourfully playful:
.
Though, coincidentally, it looks like the Vancouver influence has made its way across the Pacific:
.
Next: more colour, other uses.
It has always puzzled me that architecture here has such a restricted palette. I like the regional style of just wood, glass and concrete, but it is monotonous if everything is built this way. In other places with grey climates, the buildings are often extra colourful. Think Scandinavia, Eastern Europe or even Newfoundland.
yvrlutyens. “It has always puzzled me that architecture here has such a restricted palette.”
Yerrrr, me too!
Colour in architecture? Ummmmmm, how come no one noticed this . . .
http://www.theyorkshirelad.ca/8architecture/sixbuildings.html
. . . its been there a long time!
I notice another Vancouver export in your second example – a certain yoga wear retailer from Kits.
Didn’t Arthur Erickson espouse the “colour” pallette that has since afflicted Vancouver for far too many years, and been an excuse for cheap buildings under the guise of modernism? I’m visiting Japan now and its architecture is rather less restrained than Vancouver’s. Even the multitudes of mundane apartment blocks at least rarely employ unpainted concrete.
Concerning that first pic with the hi-rise behind the old church.
First, the photographer is being a bit cute. Probably used a blue-green filter or maybe did something in Photoshop. Because it is not capturing the green-glass modern buildings to the right, the trees or the warm brick of the old church.
Second, those red highlights (not racing stripes one hopes) were added when the entire building facade was given a (aluminium panel) makeover sometime in the 2000s. Before that I think it may have been wonderful 70s pebble dash concrete! In any case because this is bordering–and a significant backdrop–to the main civic square (King George Square) whose main building is the neo-classical sandstone town hall and two old churches, and the square itself was given a major facelift only a few years back, it is quite likely any change was subject to planning control.
This juxtaposition of the old with the, err, modern, was I am pretty sure, never planned originally (nothing much was planned in Brisbane!) but turns out to be pretty good as a backdrop to the square.