A Colorful Urban Intervention by Way of the Smurfs

Architizer News

A Colorful Urban Intervention by Way of the Smurfs

December 20, 2011

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Earlier this year, Storefront for Art and Architecture added a splash of color to their moving walls to showcase the work of Dutch artists Haas&Hahn. The artistic duo was loudly celebrated for breathing new life into the slums of Brazil with their rainbow candy-stripe murals scaling across the facades of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Images of the colored concrete quickly became pop visual icons of grassroots urban intervention.

Yet if you skip over to the Spanish village of Júzcar, you’ll find a similar phenomenon, which has possibly an even greater—and surely more humorous—story behind it. This tiny pueblo in Andalucia, once a pristine though unremarkable, whitewashed village, was painted uniformly in bright blue this past spring, and there were no artists or designers behind this effort. In fact, this is the work of mega corporation Sony in a publicity stunt to mark the opening of The Smurfs (or Los Pitufos in Spanish) movie. More after the jump!

Júzcar in its previous whitewashed form.

According to Kuriositas, Sony Pictures executives showed up in Júzcar in spring of 2011 looking to paint one of the famed “white towns of Andalucia” blue for their half-billion-dollar-grossing Smurfs film. Sony promised to restore the town to its original white after six months and offered financial compensation as well. After a town meeting, a unanimous vote precipitated the arrival of 1,100 gallons of bright blue paint, and shortly after, Júzcar became a real life Smurftown.

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With the new look came a host of whimsical Smurf-related activities, including Smurf painting competitions, a Smurf market, and Smurf-themed weddings inside a blue-walled church. The pueblo of 220 residents experienced a spike in tourism, from a few hundred visitors a year to 80,000 people in six months. The village experienced a blue-colored gold rush, if you will.

The real story, however, is that when Sony returned to the village ready to call in another thousand gallons of white paint, villagers voted overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the town blue, with some of the more fanatic town members dressing up in their favorite Smurf outfits. So now, Júzcar will remain blue, the color of urban intervention of a different sort, but a fully embraced intervention nonetheless.

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