Shades of Green

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, let’s talk about green architecture. Maybe not the type of green you’re thinking of, but rather the color itself and how it can change the perception of a design.

Colors, like few other elements of design, have a powerful ability to immediately elicit emotional responses from a mere glance. For example, red and yellow can induce feelings of hunger. Don’t believe me? Take a look at nearly any fast food chain and you’ll notice one thing in common, they all employ red and yellow dominantly in the logo and often the restaurant itself.

Green is used to convey feelings of luck, prosperity, envy, and greed. Yet green is also the color most closely associated with nature. Brands like John Deer, Whole Foods, and Animal Planet all utilize green in their logos and marketing to invoke thoughts of peace, health or nature. It is this connection, between the color green and the natural environment, which likely inspired the moniker “green architecture” in the first place. Designs that are “green” by this connotation typically incorporate the environment while also respecting it through sustainable materials and building practices. Indoor-outdoor living and garden walls have become increasingly popular trends.

If a product, brand or building is intended to be perceived as environmentally conscious, they are often related to the color green. In architecture and design, there is a desire to connect to the environment, a desire to be viewed as “green”. Take a blank wall and plant ivy in front of it. Suddenly this empty, under-designed space becomes textured, tactile, and full of life, it becomes green, with a new character and dimension added to an otherwise flat surface.

Now I’m not suggesting that simply painting this same wall green will create the same perception, but it will elicit a response of some kind, a response different than if it were white or red. It may allude to money, power, and greed but it may also get the mind wandering to rolling hills or dense forests. It may just get you thinking green.