Glass Blue sets the weight of the palette in trust and stability, and Steel Column is the swatch that breaks rank: a single charcoal that stops the set reading as one note. Lobby Dark to Curtain Wall spans 84 points of lightness, so the palette can carry its own hierarchy without reaching for a second one. Lobby Dark is the loudest thing in the set and it is still cool, so every accent the palette offers recedes rather than advances.
Steel Column is black's softer relative, still authoritative, but with enough warmth to feel considered rather than severe.
Glass Blue is the most trusted color in color psychology: competence, stability, calm, used constantly by institutions that need to be believed.
Sky Reflect is the most trusted color in color psychology: competence, stability, calm, used constantly by institutions that need to be believed.
Curtain Wall reads as purity and openness, the color of empty space, clarity, and things left deliberately unresolved.
Lobby Dark a deep navy or midnight blue, trust deepened into authority and gravity.
The glass tower as global default - after Johnson and Hitchcock's 1932 exhibition, Mies's steel skeleton and curtain wall became the template for every postwar corporate headquarters from New York to Tokyo to São Paulo.
Explore the full International Style style guideIts decade on the timeline · 1930s