By now it’s clear that “Millennial Pink,” a shade of pink somewhere between peach and baby pink, has infiltrated everything. It’s the color of minimalist beauty brands, Instagram-friendly restaurants, and women-only social clubs. It’s god damn everywhere.
But someone else besides Drake and Rihanna once loved millennial pink, long before Glossier was using it to sell expensive balms. Frank Lloyd Wright, the influential architect who designed New York City’s Guggenheim museum and hundreds of other buildings, seemed to like the shade. He liked it so much that when he was originally drafting designs for the Guggenheim museum, which was inspired by a nautilus shell, Wright made two designs for a pink museum: one a bright, reddish hot pink and the other a peachy shade that looks a lot like the ubiquitous millennial pink.
Eventually Wright settled on white, which is a shame because god knows the Guggenheim would be extremely on trend right now had it been done up in baby pink.
In the mid-1950s, Wright established his historic home and office in Arizona named Taliesin West. There he created the “Taliesin West color palette” which included two millennial pink-y shades: Wright Shell Pink and Wright Flesh Pink, the latter being just a little more peach. The palette was inspired by the natural landscape of Arizona, all of its rocky terrain and pretty sunsets.
This shade of pink actually shows up in a lot of Wright’s work. The Marin County Civic Center in California which Wright designed has light pink stucco walls and has since been dubbed “Big Pink.” The King Kamehameha Golf Club, which was actually based on designs Wright made for a house for Marilyn Monroe, is baby pink. The Arizona State University’s performing arts center the Grady Gammage Auditorium, designed by Wright, is often described as looking like a “pink wedding cake.” Some of his homes like Gordon House feature pink bathrooms.
Even by happy accident, when the couple Dr. George and Mildred Ablin commissioned Wright to completely design their house in 1959, the architect meant for them to have a home made of gray concrete. Instead, after Wright died, the family chose to paint the whole house pink. And that family is definitely the trendiest of them all.
Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly identified Taliesin West as being based in Nevada. It is based in Arizona. Jezebel regrets the error.
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