Eight of the World’s Most Colorful Buildings

Color has shaped architecture for thousands of years, helping buildings communicate joy, spirituality and cultural identity. Long before modern architects turned to vivid facades, Neanderthals decorated cave walls with pigments taken from the earth.

That tradition continued through the polychrome temples of ancient Egypt and Greece, the multicolored marble structures of ancient Rome, medieval church windows and the frescoed walls and ceilings of the Italian Renaissance. Color remains equally visible in the bright, reflective surfaces of the late 20th and 21st centuries.

Among the examples is Sri Ranganatha Swamy Temple in Tamil Nadu, India. Construction began in the first century AD and continued under several dynasties until the late 20th century. The religious complex covers more than 60 hectares and is guarded by 21 entrance towers, or gopurams, whose three-dimensional details carry vivid pigments.

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an overabundance of spiritual life

Designer Adam Nathaniel Furman told the BBC that the temple’s intense use of pigment expresses “an overabundance of spiritual life” and carries visitors and worshippers beyond everyday experience. Another featured building, Barcelona’s 1908 Palau de la Música Catalana, combines art nouveau, Romanesque and Gothic influences with Mudéjar-inspired motifs and Valencian traditions. Its aesthetic has come to embody Catalonia’s strong cultural identity.

Furman and writer Kate Mazade describe color in their book Chromatic Architecture: The Craft of Colour in Design as “the crucial ingredient that elevates a building to levels of resonance and delight unreachable by other means.” The eight featured structures invite a bolder look at what color can achieve in architecture.

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the crucial ingredient that elevates a building to levels of resonance and delight unreachable by other means