Facades Full of Color

Rising high above booming Edmonton, this multi-hued penthouse has the best view in the province.

Along this Great Barrington home’s facades, deep window openings pop through the silvery, white-cedar cladding in bright bursts. “The punches of color are points of personal expression,” says Taylor, cofounder of Taylor and Miller Architecture and Design. “They let the vitality of the residents leak out so passersby can experience the inside from the outside.”

The two-tone corrugated metal cladding helps the sheds blend into the landscape, along with windows custom-colored by the manufacturer to match. Photo by Mike Sinclair.

The striking black facade of Pieter Weijnen's home in IJburg, Amsterdam, is the result of the Japanese practice of charring wood. Weijnen, an architect at the Amsterdam firm Faro, first discovered charred wood through the work of Terunobu Fujimori and later traveled to the Japanese island of Naoshima to observe the traditional technique. Photo by Hans Peter Follmi.

Seen here from the south, Villa van Vijven’s orange facade is meant to mimic the tiled rooftops of Holland’s country buildings, while the building’s horizontal pull echoes the flat landscape.

“Do you really like your building?” the Brook’s director, Paul Pavon, was asked by an acquaintance, who compared the appearance of the 90,000- square-foot supportive housing development in New York’s famously blighted South Bronx to that of the Tetris video game. Indeed he does: “If you walk around this neighborhood, not too many buildings look like this. So there’s some kind of pride when the tenants come home.”