Does This Make me Look Green?

An Environmental Color Palette Takes Hold in Boulder

By Jenny Shank, 1-24-07

	Goose Creek Condos. Photo by Jenny Shank.

An article in the January 22nd New Yorker ("Made in the Shade” by Eric Konigsberg) about a color consultant who works with siding manufacturers to determine what colors will be available for use in homes across the country got me thinking about how many of the new buildings in Boulder share the same color palette, a range of tasteful hues that is exemplified by the Nature Conservancy Building on Spruce Street, usually including brick or flagstone red, a muted slate blue or plum, cement or steel gray, and sage green.  Often the developers behind buildings using these colors purport an environmental approach to design.

I happen to like these colors, and I find that they blend well with the mountains, but I wonder if there’s some psychological or marketing component to their recent rash of appearances that seeks to capitalize on their environmental connotations.  All the hip, expensive housing and retail developments around town are slathering them on these days.  The Steelyards on 30th Street, Twenty Ninth Street mall, much of the new North Boulder developments, the St. Julien Hotel downtown, and the new Goose Creek Condo development on Valmont, to name a few projects, all feature similar colors.

This color palette isn’t reserved only for buildings catering to the well-to-do, however: the Boulder Homeless Shelter, completed in 2003, features the same nature-inspired hues.  The $4 million building, know popularly as the Taj Ma Homeless, includes “an energy-saving and environmentally-friendly design,” according to the website of the contractors who built it, FCI Constructors.

Oz Architects, who built the Nature Conservancy Building, describe their approach to the project in this way on a webpage about a design award that the building won: “The design is intended to combine traditional elements with more contemporary components in a harmonious way. Another challenge/opportunity was to provide a level of environmental consideration demanded by a client like The Nature Conservancy. The extensive use of natural exterior materials like stone, brick, rusted metal panels, cement fiberboard panels and wood reflect an image consistent with this organization.”

While the architects who originally began using this palette may have done so because these were the colors of the environmentally-friendly materials they wanted to use, it now seems like contractors who have no interest in anything but the bottom line might be using these colors as a shorthand to tell people that a building is environ-minty.  The people to whom these colors appeal might be just as status-conscious as those who purchase beige McMansions, but status-conscious in an outdoorsy Boulder way.  To each his own signifier.

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