By Hannah Martin for Architectural Digest.
Whether tinted in a pretty pastel or saturated in juicy brights, these polychromatic buildings add a dash of color to their surroundings.
Looking for parking? Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners' garage in Santa Monica, Calif., is easy to spot with its concrete-and-colored-channel-glass façade that appears as opaque planes of color by day and illuminated fluorescence by night.
For the business school facilities at the International Management Institute in Kolkata, India, Abin Design Studio sandwiched a colored resin called PVB between panes of glass to create the building's undulating, rainbow-hued exterior.
For his Cathedral of Brasília, completed in 1970, architect Oscar Niemeyer constructed a striking hyperboloid structure from 16 concrete columns. Years later, a 21,528-square-foot stained-glass work by Marianne Peretti replaced the clear glass that filled the negative space between the pillars, creating a swirling pattern of blues and greens visible from both inside and out.
For MUSAC -- a contemporary art museum in León, Spain -- architecture firm Mansilla+Tuñón was inspired by the stained glass in the city's Gothic architecture. In their contemporary homage, the architects used colored glass panels to create the building's joyous exterior.
The Cologne Oval Offices in Germany, an office complex completed in 2010 by architecture firm Sauerbruch Hutton, owes its brilliant façade to 5,000 vibrantly colored louvers. Each laminated glass pane is screen-printed with color that is then perforated with transparent dots, allowing the surface to appear opaque or transparent, depending on the passing light.
Artist Spencer Finch has temporarily vamped up the Morgan Library & Museum's Renzo Piano-designed Gilbert Court in New York by applying colorful film to some of the windows of the four-story glass volume.
Artist Spencer Finch has temporarily vamped up the Morgan Library & Museum's Renzo Piano-designed Gilbert Court in New York by applying colorful film to some of the windows of the four-story glass volume.
For a biochemistry building at the University of Oxford, London-based architecture firm Hawkins\Brown used laminated colored-glass panels to pick up the colors of the surrounding environment.
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