Big, ugly concrete buildings are fine with Saanich council, but don鈥檛 try to paint them in bright colours. The elected style gurus slapped down Cineplex Entertainment this week when it asked to repaint the exterior of the SilverCity movie complex at Tillicum Centre.
The blue colour scheme, adorned with white and gold stars, would be too 鈥済audy鈥� against the forest backdrop of Cuthbert Holmes Park, said Mayor Frank Leonard.
Colour schemes are a matter of taste, and we don鈥檛 envy councillors the responsibility of such decisions.
However, comparing the current and proposed paint jobs, it鈥檚 hard to see why one is better than the other. Neither uses natural colours, so they both clash with the trees behind the building. The proposed blue is arguably richer and more interesting than the weak current colours; bold can be a nice change, and blue always wins in surveys of people鈥檚 favourite colours.
Look in the other direction, and it becomes less of an issue. The theatre sits beside a parkade and a hockey arena in a shopping centre with one of the biggest parking lots in the region. This is not a wilderness beauty spot.
The real clash is not colour, but shape. Any big, rectangular box full of seats and movie screens is going to look out of place against the forest.
Saanich councillors are doing their best to protect the sensibilities of residents, but in this case, they missed the boundary between sense and sensibility.
