Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages”
Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less gray and darker gray, light gray, medium gray, with barely lit train stations and stores as if to conceal the stains of gray misery.
After the lockdowns many public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to dark gray, various shades of gray, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in gray and it was cheap?
Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. People excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.
Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that something painted in less showy colors sells much easier and quicker.
Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.
Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.” Well-to-do Americans call those who like bright colors, “Lilly Pulitzer people.” The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.