Creativity Quote by John Hench

Color, here, isn’t decoration; it’s a quiet power grab. John Hench frames hue as the thing the “serious” professionals - architects and engineers - supposedly sidestep, not because it’s trivial but because it’s slippery: subjective, cultural, impossible to prove with calculations. By calling color “critical,” he’s arguing that what gets dismissed as taste is actually the last mile of meaning. A building can stand without color; it can’t, in his view, land emotionally without it.

The subtext is a gentle indictment of modernist restraint and technocratic confidence. Architects and engineers are cast as guardians of structure and logic, people trained to mistrust the messy, human layer. Hench positions himself as the necessary proxy for the public’s gut reaction: “somebody has to stand in.” That phrase matters. It suggests an audience that isn’t in the room when decisions are made, and an artist whose job is to advocate for sensation, delight, legibility, even memory.

Context sharpens the point. Hench worked in environments where color isn’t incidental but engineered for feeling - most famously in themed spaces where the “finish” is the story. When he calls color “the emotional part of a structure,” he’s describing a design hierarchy: physics first, then psychology. The satisfaction he claims isn’t just pride in prettiness; it’s the satisfaction of being the bridge between inert materials and lived experience, between a structure that functions and a place that registers.