THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
Sunday, January 30, 2000
Section: ARTS
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 1F
RICHARD MASCHAL, Staff Writer
Column: DEVELOPMENT/DOUG SMITH

DRAB UPTOWN PALETTE DESERVES MORE COLOR

Charlotte's a gray town.

It's not a matter of a lack of excitement or things to do. It's about a lack of color, about buildings that are gray, especially the buildings uptown. A few aren't.

Those others are beige.

At a time when the variety of building materials, from tinted glass to colored Dryvit, offers architects the widest palette ever, the chromatic range hereabouts goes from about A to B. The headquarters buildings of the two banks, First Union on South Tryon and Bank of America on North Tryon, have a rosy hue. And the lobby of Cesar Pelli's Bank of America building and Founder's Hall behind it are rich with color, orangey-red and green marble and purple and mustard yellow paint.

But the new First Union building designed by Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates Inc. of Atlanta and just completed at South Tryon and Third streets joins the parade of gray-skinned pachyderms making our city blander than it needs to be.

Color seems especially important at a time when the dominant palette in uptown Charlotte is changing. Red brick was the building material of choice for a century. It's common on schools, houses and commercial buildings around town and even on newer buildings uptown such as the condos on North College Street. But as old two-story uptown buildings are knocked down, the color of the city changes.

Color matters. Architecture is the art you can't avoid. The new building changes your view or casts a shadow over your shoulder. It's not inconceivable, then, that a city with an alive environment, with textures and colors, could add some zest to your day.

If you want color, bright like daises after a rain, recent residential development is the place to look. The reasons offer insight into why more color doesn't show up uptown.

At Park West on Park Road near Kenilworth, architect and developer David Furman used a reddish maroon to trim doors and window and gold and a gray with hints of violet on siding for a bright but warm combination. At Hawthorne Court, on Hawthorne Lane near Sunnyside, architect Narmour Wright Associates designing for Tuscan Development, really jumped off the bland wagon, using rich Mediterranean earth colors such as terra cotta and yellow.

Ray Farris, an architect and managing member with Tuscan, says the developers, inspired by the look of an Italian hill town, chose the colors with a particular reason in mind.

"Color invokes memory and memory evokes a sense of place, and our objective was to create a small community with a unique and distinctive flavor that resonates for the residents and the surrounding community," says Farris.

Furman, who has probably designed more infill housing in Charlotte than any other architect, felt a sameness creeping into these residences built in established neighborhoods and wanted to do something fresh with Park West. And he wanted to attract customers.

"The clientele you're trying to reach is more adventuresome," he says. "They're generally younger and hipper and looking for something to differentiate themselves."

Furman's point - the power of market forces - is key to understanding Charlotte's lack of color uptown.

It's not necessarily that architects are adverse to using bold colors. It's more likely what clients will bear. Furman also develops his project, so, in effect, he's his own client, not a bad position for an architect.

"If you're in the development world, you deal with where you think the market is and that sometimes means a common-denominator mentality," says Furman. "You try to reach the largest number of people, and oftentimes that's a conventional mindset."

Moreover, a big institutional client might not want to stand out but project a more sober image, the reason 50 years ago banks looked like little Greek temples. It was an attempt to ape the style of civic architecture and so appropriate civic solidity.

As Furman points out, a signature architect such as Pelli has the heft to persuade an institutional client to be bold. Otherwise, we can hope businesses in Charlotte get looser.

"The hip companies will be trying to do something more hip," says Furman. "We just need more hip companies."

Or at least more willing to take risks for good design.

The tactility of the brick that once dominated uptown worked well with slicker, more modern materials such as glass and steel. But newer materials have a much wider chromatic range. Pelli, for instance, did three buildings in Los Angeles in blue, green and red. The hard-coat stucco used at Hawthorne Court could be tinted virtually any hue.

Let a thousand colors bloom! In a banker's uptown of gray suits, white shirts and small-patterned ties, let's hope a prediction Furman makes comes true.

"I'd like to think there's going to be more movement, more of a push to making architecture a higher priority but also more distinctive and color will be a part of that," he says.

"I hope so anyway."*