Architecture to Chocolate: Drawing from Inspirations

If it’s one thing that I took away from all my drawing, drafting and design classes is that color is a useful tool.

Color can affect mood. Red is an intense color which can stimulate your senses causing a faster hearbeat and breathing. The effects of blue is opposite of red. Blue is a calming color, causing a relaxing sensation to the viewer. Color is a cultural phenomenon. For many, it is the symbolizes love. Many Asian brides wear red for this reason and in China, it also symbolizes good luck. In western cultures, white is worn to symbolize purity. Yellow is a mourning color in Egypt while yellow symbolizes courage in Japan.

In other words, color is powerful.

There are two people in the architectural field have been an influence in my career: The first is my ex-professor from UCDavis where I studied Environmental Design. The other is a world renowned architect from Mexico.

Richard Berteaux: He is a Professor Emeritus at UCDavis and the first to introduce me to the use of color as a main design element. Below is a photo of a swimming pool and a singular wall of clean color. The wall is eye catching, and calms the viewer with it’s blue hue. From this vantage point, the clear blue sky is dotted with green flora. Those colors are repeated in the wall. This also happens to be my ex-professor’s backyard.

“Color has been exploited as an underlying theme and often a major design element in nearly all our work: Bold or more modest color, but often applied in subtle ways. We have always utilized color to give a desired aesthetic “punch” to a part or whole of a building, to create a “look” or “feel” to an interior space, a building or a complex.” Richard Berteaux

Ricardo Leggoretta: Ricardo Leggoretta is a world renowned architect from Mexico with structures in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa….just to name a few. He uses color as a main ingredient in all of his structures. It is his signature design element.

These great architects use bold color similarly to the way my little bars are wrapped; clean and modern, striking and begging for attention. In an endless sea of chocolate bars on the chocolate shelf, my bars stand out. The bold simplicity of color catches the consumer’s eye. If it’s a bar they have never seen before, it is often picked up, observed and studied, and hopefully makes it into the shopping cart.