Timber Core sets the weight of the palette in authority and restraint, and Sky Garden is the swatch that breaks rank: a single gray that stops the set reading as one note. Tower Base to Concrete Band spans 76 points of lightness, so the palette can carry its own hierarchy without reaching for a second one. Saturation averages 12 percent, so close to grey that Concrete Band reads as a colour accent purely by being the least grey thing present.
Timber Core is black's softer relative, still authoritative, but with enough warmth to feel considered rather than severe.
Sky Garden is true neutrality, balance and restraint, a color that recedes so the palette's other choices can carry the emotional weight.
Living Wall functions as quiet breathing room, understated, unobtrusive, built to let other colors do the talking.
Concrete Band a peach or apricot tint, all the friendliness of orange with none of the volume.
Tower Base a near-black indigo, depth, focus, the color of late-night thought.
No single doctrine - the live edge of global practice where Diébédo Francis Kéré builds with compressed earth and Kengo Kuma weaves timber lattices, both answering the same question: what should architecture do right now?
Explore the full Contemporary Architecture style guideIts decade on the timeline · 2000s