Base Dark sets the weight of the palette in warmth and creativity, and Stone Shadow is the swatch that breaks rank: a single brown that stops the set reading as one note. Base Dark to Pediment Light spans 78 points of lightness, so the palette can carry its own hierarchy without reaching for a second one. Pediment Light is the loudest thing in the set and every swatch beside it is warm too, which gives the palette no way to cool a page down and no colour to rest an eye on.
Base Dark a deep rust or umber, orange's heat banked into something earthy and lived-in.
Stone Shadow a dusty taupe-brown, quiet and unassuming.
Dressed Stone a burnt or terracotta orange, warmth read through a rustic, sun-worn filter.
Frieze a mustard or ochre yellow, optimism weathered into something wiser and more textured.
Pediment Light a peach or apricot tint, all the friendliness of orange with none of the volume.
Classical proportion with ornament removed - the 1930s compromise between Modernism's abstraction and government's need for civic authority, producing Paul Philippe Cret's Federal Reserve buildings and the ambiguous gravitas of interwar state architecture.
Explore the full Stripped Classicism style guideIts decade on the timeline · 1920s