Sandcastles

A few years ago, I travelled to Phoenix to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. Driving into the city, I texted a friend my first reaction: “Phoenix, well .. it’s just an enormous amount of beige.” All this sand-colored harmony – I assumed initially – had everything to do with the popularity of the Pueblo-Revival-style in Arizona. Nowadays mostly made out of lightweight timber frames, wrapped in layers of TYVEK, and finished with a generous icing of crème-colored stucco, these homes mimic the adobe structures of the Pueblo Indians, and as such, seemed to belong to a local stylistic narrative. In a region plagued by endless suburban sprawl, high-end spa resorts, Jack Nicklaus–designed golf courses and retirement communities, all this sand-colored meekness of course also had also another raison d’être: effortless commercial consensus. All those light-brown, yellowish, tan, ecru, cream, and biscuit colored settlements, provide an architectural language that is gentle, likeable and compliant; the outcome of targeted customer analysis and elaborate market studies. A color palette of unanimous agreement.

Fast forward 10 years, and all that sand-colored politeness spread over the globe, faster than the 2020-wave of coronavirus, and flooded the world of architectural design, home improvement magazines, Tik Tok channels and Instagram accounts alike. Now, reinvented as the anti-dote against cold glass-and-steel corporate architecture, it presents itself as the natural, organic, and responsible solution for all your architectural needs. There are so many beige-options to give ‘depth and warmth’ to your Brooklyn condo (ranging from lime stuccos, Moroccan tadelakt and Indian mud paint, to clay and roman plasters …but, most likely, just a Farrow Ball hue mimicking them) that it feels like an act of defiance to leave a part of your interior just plain white. Even in our own projects, I must admit, the sandman has left his imprint through pro-active clients with inspirational-Pinterest-mood-boards, as an easy solution to mediate irreconcilable opinions, or sometimes simply as the righty fit for a specific environment (like a beach or a desert, for example). Propelled by the ubiquitous Aesop stores, reclaimed-wooden-floor coffeeshops, cozy hotel lobbies, and other ethic-atmospheric environments, the earth-mania is especially prosperous in the tech-capital-co-work-hubs of dense urban settings, where it supports new streams of capital, veiled in the esthetics of environmentalism. There, the lack of any real socialization between the individuals (read: consumers), is countered by the soothing warmth of authentic tactile materials (and, of course, by stenciling the word ‘community’ on the wall). The real performance of all those rustic mineral wall finishes is not their low-carbon-footprint or absence-of-VOC, but to absorb the white-blue glow emanating from the i-screens in the room. The force of the sand-empire is unavoidable: if we abide by current trend-setters and design gurus, we’ll all be living in some kind of Tatooine-inspired condo by 2050. I just need to add that Pantone chose “Mocha Mousse” as the color of the year 2025: ‘A rich brown hue infused with earthy refinement’. What else can I say?

Koolhaas phrased it well, when decoding architecture’s lost battle against accelerated urbanization in the 20th century: “We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away.”(1) The engulfing powers of late capitalism have definitively not ebbed away, and in these early decennia of the 21th century the only thing we have managed to provide as a response, is a new set of castles made of sand.

(1) Rem Koolhaas, “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?”, S,M,L,XL, OMA, (with Bruce Mau), The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971

Image: Photographs by Benjamin Hoste for The Wall Street Journal