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Florida, Latin American and Caribbean styles long have infused buildings with color
Pink hues are associated with South Florida, yes, but the color is embraced elsewhere, too.
Toulouse, France, is known as the Pink City for its heavy use of red-pink terracotta bricks.
Jaipor, India, also is known as the Pink City for its pink buildings painted as a show of hospitality to welcome Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, in 1876. There's even a law in Jaipor requiring that new buildings hew to the rose hue.
And while pink sometimes is linked to politics or protest, its lasting message is mostly that of health, architects said. Even the phrase 'being in the pink' conveys a message of well-being.
In Florida, Latin American and Caribbean styles long have infused buildings with color. And in the 1920s, architect Addison Mizner created his signature style of Mediterranean and Spanish influences, including reddish barrel-tiled roofs, in Boca Raton and Palm Beach.
People today generally associate the color pink with women and girls. Think Barbie and the hot pink marketing blitz accompanying the 2023 release of the Barbie film, followed by the Barbiecore fashion that accompanied the hoopla.
But it wasn't always so.
Rocco Ceo, an architecture professor at the University of Miami, said throughout the centuries, pink has been associated with wealth and often, men.
'Color is always shifting in terms of its meaning and cultural significance,' said Ceo, who teaches seminars on color theory.
In the late 1970s, an up-and-coming architecture firm called Arquitectonica designed a waterfront house in Miami Shores that became known as the Pink House.
The property featured five shades of rose-tinted paint, ranging from a light pink to a red.
The tower features a large cutout square filled with a palm tree, a red staircase and a giant rounded hot tub.
Arquitectonica then would go on to design a new condominium for the Miami skyline: the 22-story building known as The Atlantis on Brickell
Bright, bold tropical colors were used to 'draw attention to this city and its potential,' Arquitectonica co-founder Fernando Fort-Brescia said in a recent interview.
It worked. The next year, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Surrounded Islands" installation turned Miami's Biscayne Bay into an explosion of bubble-gum pink, with 11 islands surrounded by 6.5 million square feet of floating pink fabric.
Then along came a television show in 1984 featuring two stylish police detectives set in a Miami wonderland of color.
Miami Vice actor Don Johnson wore suits and T-shirts that often included the color pink. Although Greater Miami's once colorful Art Deco pastels had by the early 1980s decayed and turned gritty, Miami Vice depicted a sexy tropical landscape and an aspirational notion of South Florida paradise.
Such was the environment when the Phillips Point complex in West Palm Beach was built in 1985 by real estate developer Murray Goodman.
Alexandra Clough is a business writer at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at aclough@ X: @acloughpbp. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Why pink is associated with South Florida style, look
