Architecture to Color!

When an architecture studio puts a box of crayons in your hands, the discipline stops being something you only admire from the sidewalk and becomes something you participate in. That is the idea behind a coloring book released by the Mexico-based Carmelina & Aurelio Architecture Studio, which turns their architectural illustrations of well-known buildings into pages anyone can fill in. The book is open for everyone to download from the studio’s website, and you can also grab the wallpapers that the studio colored themselves.

What makes the project welcoming is that the drawings are not technical. There are no construction details to decode and no scale to measure. It does not matter if you are 15 or 105 years old, a doctor or an artist. You pick a color, you make a choice, and a famous facade slowly becomes yours. Maybe some of the children who color these pages will grow up to be the architects of the future, and even those who do not will have spent an afternoon looking closely at buildings most people walk past without a second glance.

The buildings you get to color

The featured structures read like a short tour of modern art and architecture across Mexico and Brazil. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s House-Studio, designed by Juan O’Gorman, pairs two separate volumes linked by a bridge and remains one of the early statements of functionalist architecture in Mexico. Palmas 555 brings a contemporary office presence into Mexico City. Casa Barragán, the home and studio of Luis Barragán, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site celebrated for its play of color, light, and quiet interior space.

Then there is the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, the saucer-like form that Oscar Niemeyer set on a cliff above Guanabara Bay. Its sweeping curves are exactly the kind of shape that rewards a free hand and an unexpected palette.

Coloring is a low barrier way to study architecture. Tracing a wall or a curve with a pencil forces you to notice proportion, rhythm, and the relationship between solid and void, all without a single line of jargon. Print a page, share it with someone who has never thought about buildings before, and see which structure they reach for first.

Why Coloring Books Work as Architecture Education

A coloring book strips architecture down to its outlines, and that simplicity is exactly what makes it a useful teaching tool. When the technical details disappear, what remains is the building’s essential shape: its massing, its rhythm of openings, and the balance between solid wall and open void. Filling those shapes with color slows the viewer down and forces a kind of attention that a quick glance from the sidewalk never demands. The act of choosing where one color stops and another begins quietly teaches the difference between a window, a column, and a shadow.

This is why the Carmelina and Aurelio project works for both children and adults. A child learns to see buildings as objects worth looking at, while an adult rediscovers facades they had stopped noticing. Neither needs any background in design to take part, which is the point.

A Closer Look at the Architects Behind the Pages

The buildings chosen for the book carry real history. Juan O’Gorman, who designed the Rivera and Kahlo House-Studio, was both a painter and an architect, and his early functionalist houses brought European modernism into a distinctly Mexican setting. Luis Barragan, whose home is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, became famous for using color, light, and water to create calm, almost spiritual interiors, and he received the Pritzker Prize in 1980. Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian master behind the Niteroi museum, was known for sculptural curves that he often said were inspired by mountains and the human body.

Knowing even a little about these figures turns a coloring page into a small lesson. The saucer form of Niteroi or the layered volumes of the House-Studio become easier to appreciate once you understand the ideas that shaped them.

How to Get More Out of the Activity

You can treat each page as more than a pastime. Try coloring one facade in the palette the architect actually used, then color a second copy in colors of your own choosing, and compare how the two versions feel. Pay attention to which parts of the drawing read as forward and which recede once you add tone. For families, printing a stack of pages and letting everyone pick a different building turns an afternoon into a relaxed conversation about why certain shapes appeal to us.

The Bigger Picture

Projects like this matter because they make architecture feel approachable rather than exclusive. A discipline often discussed in technical language becomes something anyone can hold in their hands and play with. Whether or not a single reader grows up to design buildings, the habit of looking closely at the built world is worth encouraging. Download a page, share it with someone who has never thought twice about architecture, and watch which structure they reach for first.