The suburbs of North America have recently blossomed out in a slew of pink brick buildings. From hospitals to restaurants to schools to office buildings to townhouses to banks to strip malls, pink appears to be the color of upper-class territorial expansion. The shiny brown brick of the eighties mall, the classic Crayola brick red: these have vanished. Their replacement: a slick, cool, tasteful and subdued pink, accented by decorative rounds of grey or beige concrete. Often a row of spindly trees or shrubs, gleaming with bright new mulch, will flank a pink brick building, offering a dramatic contrast to the expansion of asphalt before it. The mirrored windows show nothing out or in. The gleaming doors let out a breath of stale, cold air on every opening. People in lacquered suits and pumps pass in and out, clutching their mochas against the outside world.
Pink brick is the color of progress and terror, of raised rents and cell phones. Pink brick will revive your downtown and keep pouring money into the same people. Pink brick is filled with fluorescent lighting. Pink brick rolls down the edges of sideroads like a sick new kind of turf. The roofs keep rising upward to a pale new sky.