Pantheon of Wonder

Essay

This is the 'Pantheon of Wonder', a journal with over 550+ essays on the poetic design of architecture, art, music, and meaning. It is a growing chronicle of over 25 years of research and innovation by Maria Lorena Lehman that helps you develop your creative projects for advanced beauty, function, and transcendent experience.

Use Color to Guide the Other Senses along an Architectural Journey

by Maria Lorena Lehman

Design Leverage

Color has the ability to emphasize. And what does this mean for your architectural designs? It means that you can create hierarchy, structure, order and repetition through differences. Color is a means by which you can create needed differences, in order to accentuate, subdue or compose a language. All of your building materials have color, even those that are transparent (as they usually reflect). And because of this, you can design environments that appeal to those visual senses, while also guiding the other senses toward what would be rewarding to touch, or where it would be rewarding to hear. Color reveals much of what is behind architectural elements in a glance…so don’t underestimate the power of color in all of your building materials — because their combinations yield invitations for your occupants to engage with their environments and with each other.

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Continue the Conversation

If this essay stirred a question, illuminated an idea, or touched something deeper in your own creative journey, I invite you to continue the conversation.

Each month, I reserve a small number of private one-on-one conversations for readers seeking thoughtful guidance and deeper dialogue around creativity, architecture, music, meaning, purpose, or the work they feel called to bring into the world.

These are not coaching sessions, business consultations, or productivity workshops. They are dedicated spaces for reflection, creative guidance, intellectual exploration, and discerning what comes next.

People often bring:

• A creative project or new venture

• Questions of purpose and calling

• Architecture, art, music, or writing pursuits

• Career transitions and life crossroads

• Ideas they wish to develop more deeply

• Simply a desire for meaningful conversation

Whether you are an artist, designer, architect, composer, writer, educator, founder, or lifelong learner, our conversation will be shaped around what matters most to you.

A thoughtful exchange of ideas, questions, and possibilities.

RESERVE A CONVERSATION

Limited availability each month.

Warmly,

Maria Lorena Lehman

Founder of MLL ATELIER

Author of PANTHEON OF WONDER