Painting of Bhutanese building

Thimphu has seen so much changes in recent years. And much changes predominately at a glance is brought about the number of buildings our city has come up with to accommodate much growing people. The architecture has always been an indication of the change for most part of our civilization. From a cave to a glass building, the architecture has played the part of bearing the change.

The change in building design in most of the places in the world have been either politically inspired or economic showdown. However, our buildings have always been cultural symbol than just a bearer of change. The small landlocked country with a need to project a strong sense of uniqueness and identity, it was always mandatory for a building to project a sense of cultural significance. Anyways, letting the building architecture mantra be, my observation is more focused on the building painting that our new buildings proudly wear. It is needless to say that the painting of a building at a glance would project the aforementioned changes.

Our building painting like our building style has always been inspired by the religious significance and belief. Lately, with the various shades easily available in the market, our building seems have to really gone too much into the in-depth religious belief that the aesthetic sense is lost somehow down the way. People paint the building with pink, dark red, deep blue, green, brown, yellow, you name any color, our buildings have one. The coloring, as it do not deserve to be called painting, of the building has gone from crazy to lunatic. When one's kham is red, one goes all out to paint the house red, and own red car. There are some buildings with a good facade design, but the coloring has killed it. And sadly, our concerned authorities do not care to intervene also.

Forget about the private buildings, some of the school buildings lately have such a bad blue color in their front facade. Who is smoking what, God knows? As one of the my senior colleagues points out, the painting of the building in such a awful fancy style is a visual pollution. It harms the environment, and yet no one cares to talk about it than just casually pointing their address as near the red building in Changzamtog, or green building near this or that.