Historic brick mills in old New England cities and towns inspire a desire for decorative art
- to humanize the scale,
- celebrate the contemporary spirit of the place,
- brighten up the whole neighborhood, and
- send a sign of the new renaissance or adaptive re-use
to thousands of neighbors and travelers daily.
At Riverwalk Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, banners and silver numbers awaken curiosity,
blue awnings and red Salvatore’s signs invite you inside. The parking lot is 7.5 acres, orderly, awesome, mysterious, vast. Renovations are continuing month after month, most of the brick buildings have new windows and inside, new halls. Excitement and progress in the air as a major statement of the promise of city of Lawrence, define the creative discipline and cultural interests of the owners, and declare the new day is dawning.
Bricks and mortar can absorb digitally printed photographs or a specially treated substrate through a heat transfer process, so giant murals can adhere directly to the walls without painting. Painting is still a beautiful art form of course.
The most understated design to give the exterior walls subtle character and pizzazz would be to paint dark and light horizontal stripes and window accents to articulate the masonry with a contemporary flair.
Imagine the ornament on mammoth Memorial Hall at Harvard, with black and beige horizontal stripes and Gothic window accents, or drive past high tech renovations in Cambridgeport with many painted brick buildings housing the start-ups from MIT, with blue, maroon or brown stripes, or imagine gold, silver, copper and reflective paints, my absolute favorite. Another approach, in Brooklyn, the children’s museum (about the same scale) is all covered in banana yellow tiles: shocking, memorable.
Painting exterior ornament and murals is ideal for branding a location to create strong place identity. As an alternative technique, innovative digital printing of building wraps can match the scale of murals for very powerful environmental effects without paint. More varieties of artful banners in alternating colors or series reinforce the aura of hospitality and new business.
Insights: color and art change the reality and mood of urban life, certain walls can be subtle and classical, others bold, whimsical, adventurous, wild, fresh, hot.
Here browse among sketches and suggestions for the mills -- murals, wraps and more. Soon will offer Public Art Slides of murals from coast to coast. Enjoy!
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