• What: Exterior of 1009 Davis St
• Where: Downtown Evanston, IL
• When: Photo taken on Friday, April 11th at 3:45 pm
• Why: We had to stop and take a photo of this sweet retro exterior. The building, which we'd date back to the late '70s, is a good example of a pattern that was in - went out - and is now back in style. The four-color tiles are teeny, about half inch square, but the effect is mesmerizing. In fact, it reminds us of TV static, with a hipster slant. If this were a new construction, however, it might lack some of the vintage charm. The rainwater stains only add to the throw-back appeal.
Jump down for a close-up of the somewhat shocking color combo...
The random mosaic is composed of four colors: a tanned flesh-tone, Robin's egg blue, a cookies'n'cream speckle, and white. Up-close, the single shades are a tad, well, barfy, but they end up really working well together. We instantly thought of the 
I would push that back to the early to mid 60s instead of the 70s. The mini mosaic tile trend was part of the 1950s/60's Googie Architecture movement.
My California high school completed in 1965 had pointy roof-lines, wild curves, and tiny mosaic tiles covered key areas of nearly every building. By the 70s, it was all about wood, which is also having a comeback.
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I love this apparently-random-but-carefully-calibrated pattern. l used to have a shetland wool tweed jacket that had about two dozen colors in random distribution, and it was the coolest thing I've ever owned. I could get dressed in the dark & the jacket would still pull everything else together. Too bad I wore it to shreds. It must have cost a fortune to set up the loom to weave the fabric, especially since it must have had a pretty limited sales appeal. Heck, I may have had the only one like it because I've never seen anything else even close.
Anyway, the cool part--as in the tile example, or the finish on a correctly stippled wall or George Seurat's pointillist painting technique--is that when you work like this, you can use absolutely any color (or every color), and it will still work. All you have to do is remember to use enough contrasting pairs of colors so that they cancel each other out at a distance. If you do that, the overall impression calms down really fast, while still being pretty fascinating up close. And once you achieve that overall neutrality, it's easy to skew the color mix in one direction or another simply by replacing one or two colors with their complements.
My favorite tile installation in the city, however, is a wall on East 8th Street (I think) just west of Kitty O'Shea's, a giddy extravaganza that tilts heavily in favor of reds & blacks. That one doesn't quite achive the calmness of the example above, but then, it wasn't trying to. All I know is that, with all the construction going on in the South Loop, every time I see that great wall, I wonder if it won't be the last.
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