Design
Is Beige the New Black in Architecture?
The Chicago Architecture Biennial, the biggest architecture festival in the country, reveals up-and-coming designers turning to the mundanities of everyday life for inspiration.
One of the most emotionally resonant exhibits in the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial is a quiet one: a set of tan-glazed tile arches in a hallway. The arches form a colonnade of sorts, which better defines a space that’s too wide for a hallway but too narrow for a gallery.
For its designers Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, and for me, it’s a powerful callback to childhood. The smooth tiles and grouted seams, stacked up monumentally, conjure memories of terrible pizza and tiny milk cartons in the cafeteria, the boisterous heart of so many functional, but not at all pretty, 20th-century public schools. One glance at this deep cut from our early years, and there’s a mental rush back to recess and hall passes.