Beigeification™

Black Forest Library is a series for dilettante artistic research that wanders between the disciplines: from em-dashes to emblems, palm trees to peeing, Ulysses to Virginia Woolf, and basketball to furniture.

Beige is everywhere. In recent years, this color has silently yet pervasively overtaken the visual landscape across all spheres of Western culture, slowly becoming the dominant image of its contemporary production.
Media, fashion, products, art, and architecture are all beige now. It has become impossible to ignore the overriding presence of beige in our daily lives: from its global presence on social media with millennial “sad beige” moms to the nostalgic return of Eco-Beige—an early 1990s branding style that responded to the visual excess of the 1980s with muted, “natural” tones in contemporary marketing strategies.

Edgar Rodriguez is a practicing architect, educator, and occasional writer who looks at the contemporary through its least expressive moments, paying close attention to the ordinary, the everyday, and the predominant presence of beige in the world.