Would you rather live in the gray or pink building? Acceptance of colored façades of apartment blocks among architects and laypersons and their relationship to cultural capital

Abstract

Pastelosis is a phenomenon that originated in Poland in the 1990s as a reaction to the gray color of modernist settlements that dominated communist urban spaces. This is manifested in changing the building façades through the introduction of pastel colors and their compositions. Critics of pastelosis attribute its popularity to the low level of architectural taste among the Polish population. Liking pink, orange, or blue elevations would thus be a sign of low cultural capital and of the lack of aesthetic training. The study seeks to investigate (1) acceptance of different levels of pastelosis, (2) whether acceptance of pastelosis differentiates laypersons and experts (people with training in architecture), and (3) whether attitudes toward elevations differing in the level of pastelosis are related to cultural capital (institutional, material, and embodied).In two online experiments, participants (Study 1: N = 572, including 252 experts, Study 2: N = 507, including 171 experts) evaluated four different façades differing in color (gray, pastelosis, medium pastelosis, and antipastelosis), and were tested with respect to various measures of cultural capital and socio-demographics. Elevations with pastel colors were generally preferred to traditional gray colors. Experts were more critical of all changes than were the laypersons. More consistent relations between cultural capital and evaluations of facades were found for low than high cultural capital. Popular tastes were consistently positively associated with acceptance of pastel colors on buildings’ elevations, whereas the relationship between high cultural capital and evaluations of facades depended on the type of cultural capital and was less pronounced.This study adds to the existing research on cultural capital, extending it to architectural tastes.