Introduce Colours to Your Architectural Facade Using Materials Other Than Paint

You can give a building lasting facade colour without paint by choosing a facade material that carries the colour itself: coil-coated or anodised aluminium, weathering copper, body-tinted or dichroic glass, glazed terracotta, pigmented concrete or high-pressure laminate panels. This guide is for architects, students and self-builders who want a cheerful elevation on a kindergarten, a school or a community building without the patchy look of repainted render. Because the facade colour is part of the material itself, it never needs repainting. It explains how each material gets its colour, shows built examples, compares the options in a sourced table and ends with a typical rainscreen detail.

Which facade material gives colour without paint?

Site-applied paint fades, chalks and needs repainting, and on a large elevation it can make a building look cheap. The alternatives below either bake the colour into a factory finish, put the pigment inside the material, or let a natural process such as copper weathering or light interference produce it. Each colourful facade material behaves differently with time, so the choice is as much about maintenance as about appearance. If you are still shaping the elevation itself, see these tips for designing an architectural elevation first.

List of materials for your architectural facade

1. Metal

As a coloured facade material, metal cladding is usually aluminium, steel or stainless steel. Aluminium is coloured in three main ways: a factory-applied organic coating (polyester or PVDF on coil or powder coating on panels), anodising, which grows a coloured oxide layer out of the metal itself, or a printed or laminated finish. High-performance PVDF coatings are tested to FGIA/AAMA 2605 (North America), which requires panels to survive ten years of South Florida exposure with a colour change of no more than 5 ΔE units. Metal is only one of several cladding families; if you are comparing it with brick, timber, stone or fibre cement on cost and upkeep, this guide to choosing facade cladding materials sets them side by side.

Mira Shopping Centre in Munich, Germany – Chapman Taylor, with Léon Wohlhage Wernik

The Mira centre opened in 2008 in Munich’s Nordheide district. Chapman Taylor planned the centre, while the facade design is credited to Léon Wohlhage Wernik Architekten; according to the Mira centre record, coloured lacquered metal panels are set as prisms across the west, north and part of the east elevations, so the colours shift as you walk past.

Instead of solid panels, architects often use perforated or expanded aluminium mesh. The holes make the skin semi-transparent: from a distance it reads as a coloured surface, close up it filters light and views.

Espace Culturel de La Hague in France – Périphériques Architectes (Marin + Trottin)

Faceted red panels of perforated metal wrap the entrance and terrace of this music, dance and theatre centre in Beaumont-Hague, Normandy, in northwest France, completed in 2015. The architects describe them in Dezeen’s report as coloured anodised metal; the triangular facets structure a three-dimensional screen that shelters the spaces behind.

Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore – WOHA

The Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore is wrapped, almost all round, in aluminium mesh panels in several shades of red and pink. Creepers grow up the mesh, so the colour becomes a backdrop for planting and the tower reads as a vertical garden in the tropical city.

Perforations do not have to form a regular grid. They can vary in size and shape to draw a pattern or a figure across the elevation, which turns a coloured facade material into a graphic layer.

Euronews Headquarters in Lyon – Jakob + MacFarlane

The whole building is enveloped in a green perforated aluminium skin with sinuous patterns that filters air and light. Two large oval openings in the main facade reveal strips of solid green aluminium and glass behind the screen.

Some metals colour themselves. Copper starts salmon pink, then weathers through russet and chocolate browns to the familiar blue-green patina. The Copper Development Association’s guide to copper finishes says the patina generally forms in five to seven years in industrial and coastal air, may take 10 to 14 years in rural air, and may never form in very dry climates; it is caused by airborne sulphur compounds and, once formed, is stable. Mills also supply pre-patinated or pre-oxidised sheet for clients who do not want to wait. The best-known patina is the copper skin of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Public Middle School of Labarthe-sur-Lèze in France – LCR Architectes

At this school near Toulouse the copper cladding is shown in its early, bright brown state, before weathering. Over time the same panels will darken, so the architect is designing for a colour that changes over the life of the building.

Stuckeman Family Building at Pennsylvania State University – Overland Partners with WTW Architects

The building for Penn State’s architecture and landscape architecture departments shows a metal skin used as a warm, muted colour field next to glazing rather than as a bright accent.

2. Glass

As a facade material, body-tinted glass gets its colour from metal oxides added to the melt. The glass colouring reference lists iron(II) oxide for bluish-green, cobalt for blue, and chromium for dark green; selenium is used mainly to cancel the green of iron or, at higher levels, for red. Coloured interlayers in laminated glass and ceramic frit (enamel fused onto the glass) give more colour choice and are common on facades.

Kayseri Ice Rink in Turkey – BKA-BahadırKulArchitects

This building in Kayseri, Turkey, houses an ice rink, and the designers wanted the facade to show the activity inside. They filled its amorphous openings with coloured glass, so the white volume is punctuated by panes of different hues.

Coloured glass does not have to show one colour. Dichroic glass carries thin layers of metal oxides that transmit some wavelengths and reflect others, so its colour changes with the viewing angle and the light.

Fulton A5 A1 in Paris – Agence Bernard Bühler

The Fulton housing block in Paris uses dichroic glass for its balcony balustrades. The colour reflected by the panels varies between day and night and from one viewpoint to another.

3. Ceramic

Ceramics come in three broad families: earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. Terracotta belongs to the earthenware family and has been used since antiquity for sculpture, pottery, ornament and red facades. On modern rainscreens it is extruded into tiles, baguettes or rods, either in the natural clay colour or glazed. Because a fired glaze is glass, its colour does not chalk like paint.

Coca-Cola Headquarters in Berlin, Germany – Tchoban Voss Architekten

This seven-storey office building on the Spree at Berlin’s Osthafen, completed in 2013, has horizontal ceramic cladding in five terracotta tones. Tchoban Voss matched the powder-coated horizontal profiles to the same five tones, so the red of the brand reads as one continuous, slightly varied surface.

4. Concrete

As a facade material, concrete is coloured by mixing pigments into the cement paste, so the colour runs through the whole thickness. In Europe these pigments are covered by EN 12878:2014, which includes iron oxides (reds, yellows, browns and blacks), chromium oxide green, titanium dioxide white and cobalt and ultramarine blues. White cement gives cleaner, brighter colours than grey cement.

The Yardhouse in London, UK – Assemble

Assemble’s Yardhouse studios in Sugarhouse Yard, Stratford, were fronted by handmade concrete shingles in pastel colours. According to Dezeen, the pigment dose varied from batch to batch, decided by whoever was casting tiles that day, which produced a varied but harmonious scaly elevation. Because the colour is in the concrete, not on it, this is not paint. The building was later dismantled to be rebuilt elsewhere, according to Assemble’s project page.

Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland – Studio Architektoniczne Kwadrat

This museum in Gdańsk uses coloured concrete at a much larger scale: its leaning entrance tower is wrapped in red concrete panels and glazing. The contrast between the solid red surfaces and the glass strips makes the tower a landmark on the waterfront.

5. Laminates and hybrid facades

If one material will not do, you can combine several in one facade, or use composite products that combine materials in one panel. High-pressure laminate (HPL) for exteriors is made of wood-based fibres and thermosetting resins pressed under heat, with the colour in a decorative surface layer; exterior grades are classified in EN 438-6.

Ca Don José Cultural Centre in Canals, Spain – Héctor Luengo Arquitectos

This cultural centre in Canals, in the Valencia region, completed in 2011, has a block of square panels in many colours set into a white facade, like a pixelated or Lego-like pattern. Trespa’s project page lists the panels as its HPL cladding with a satin finish.

Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park, Kansas, US – Verner Johnson

Here the colour comes from light rather than pigment. The facade combines dichroic glass with grade 304 stainless steel panels given an interference colour finish, a thin oxide layer that splits light like a film of oil. The panels are arranged to suggest the controlled prairie burns of Kansas, and the colours change through the day.

Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany – Sauerbruch Hutton

At Museum Brandhorst, completed in 2009, about 36,000 vertical glazed ceramic rods in 23 colours hang in front of horizontally folded, perforated metal sheet in two colours. Sauerbruch Hutton’s project description gives these figures. Seen obliquely the rods read as one blended colour; seen face-on, the striped metal behind shows through, so the facade changes as you move along the street.

Coloured facade material compared

The table summarises how each facade material gets its colour, which standard or reference describes it, and what happens to the colour over time. Standards are regional: check the edition your project specifies and the manufacturer’s current data sheet, as local codes and fire regulations govern.

Two points stand out. First, a coloured coating is still a coating: it will change slowly and can be scratched, so specify the performance class and keep spare panels. Second, colour that is in the material (glass, glaze, pigmented concrete) or made by light (anodising, interference, dichroic) does not chalk, but it is fixed at manufacture, so order full-size samples and view them outside before approving.

Typical detail: a ventilated rainscreen

Most of the cladding systems above, from metal and HPL panels to terracotta rods and concrete shingles, are fixed as a ventilated rainscreen. From inside to outside the assembly is: the structural wall; an airtight and vapour control layer; insulation held with fixings; a breather membrane where the system requires it; a ventilated cavity open at the top and bottom so that water drains and moisture can dry; aluminium or timber rails on brackets that cross the insulation with thermal breaks; and the coloured facade material itself, fixed with visible or concealed clips. Cavity depth, bracket spacing, cavity barriers and fire classification come from the system manufacturer and the local fire code, not from a generic drawing.

How to choose facade colour and what to check next

Start with how the colour should age. If it must stay the same for decades, use glazed ceramic, tinted glass or a PVDF-class coating; if it may change, copper and natural terracotta are honest choices. Then check the fire classification of the whole assembly, the maintenance access, and how the colour looks next to its neighbours. Colour on an elevation also changes after dark, so plan the ambient lighting that falls on it. For a low-carbon, naturally coloured alternative to these products, look at hempcrete walls finished with tinted lime render.

Sources and further reading

• Copper Development Association: copper finishes and patina
• PPG: FGIA/AAMA 2605 explained
• EN 12878:2014 pigments for cement-based materials
• Sauerbruch Hutton: Museum Brandhorst