Color in the Designed Environment
Judith Mottram and Tom Jefferies
Chapter Summary. Architectural and product design in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by clear periods where color has had variable roles within the designers’ toolkit. We suggest that both cultural understanding and physiological determinants motivate the use of particular colored or tonal schemata. The context for our exploration of color knowledge and attitudes to signification in the fields of architecture and urbanism is recent work looking specifically at urban design and place-making. To develop the discussion on color in urban space, we focus on the work of Maccreanor Lavington Architects (Rotterdam), who use road paint as a transformative medium, and Dashing Tweeds, who sample urban color as the development palette for traditional tweed fabrics. We ask at what level might conscious engagement with color knowledge and theory be present in contemporary design, in virtual environments, and in design education, and what barriers might there be to using color to add to the legibility and live-ability of the urban environment.
This chapter explores the tension between what we may know about color and how color is used by designers. Color can be an effective differentiating medium for aiding discrimination between products and places, but the history of product design and architecture in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by clear periods where color has not been particularly evident as a part of the designer’s toolkit, despite increasing understanding of its perceptual impact on users. We discuss two contemporary designers that illustrate specific strategies for engaging with color. Some interesting strands emerge from the consideration of these exemplars against a broad understanding of color knowledge across relevant disciplines: color and color stories as part of branding and positioning; the tension between materiality and seeing in the digital domain; and the role of color decisions in procurement. Against this background we look at design codes and education benchmarks and see that if design is to operate fully within a global context, greater understanding of how color works beyond the realms of personal experience might be an important part of future practice.
Color as a topic of interest for artists and designers in the Western world has moved on and off the radar over the past 500 years. Knowledge about its physical, optical, and emotional properties has been needed at different levels at different times for practical purposes. Following a brief overview of the ebbs and flows of color knowledge in this field, we consider how designers could use intelligence in this topic as a design tool.
During the Renaissance period in the visual arts (throughout the fifteenth century), the move to using oil paints on lightweight canvas supports, in combination with perspective systems of pictorial organization, enabled both a new luminosity to be created through glazes and body color, and a new verisimilitude in representation. At this time, painters either ground their own pigments into the oil medium, or instructed others to do so for them. They knew what amounts of oil were needed for different pigments and which had the required transparency for effective use as glazes. Within the decoration of the internal and external spaces of the wealthy, color and pattern was liberally applied, with trade routes to the Far East feeding an appetite for novelty and sumptuousness in fabrics and other materials. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists had less need for detailed knowledge about pigments, as new industrial “colormen” began to supply paint in tubes. By the early years of the twentieth century, color comes back into the frame. The color theory of Johannes Itten was a distinctive aspect of the contribution of the Bauhaus to instruction for artists and designers. Looking at The Art of Color (Itten 1974) now, it is striking how clearly he was drawing upon psychoanalysis in his identification of the students who made particular set of studies. The way he writes about what happens when one looks at blocks of different colors adjacent to each other also suggests a familiarity with optics and visual perception.
In the last fifty years, there has been less emphasis placed upon color within the professional sphere of art and design, apart from the flurry of post–World War II design innovation and then the brief flirtation with applied color by Memphis and postmodernist architecture in the mid-1970s and 1980s (Branzi 1992). However, during this same period, knowledge about color in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and optics has increased.
Within the broad field of the human sciences, the understanding of the perception of color and the way the eye and brain work in concert has advanced. We have come to understand that trichromacy, the ability to distinguish the three primary colors or the ability of mixing the three additive or subtractive primaries to enable matching of all colors, is not a physical property of light but a physiological limitation of the eye. We have three types of retinal photoreceptors: the short-wave sensitive cones, the mid-wave sensitive cones, and the long-wave sensitive cones. The rods are understood to not contribute to color vision except in low-light levels. The cones support three sorts of discrimination, of light from dark, of yellow from blue, and of red from green. This is achieved by summing rates of quantum catch for distinguishing luminance (drawing on M- and L-cones); comparing relative rate of quantum catch of S- to M- and L-cones (for yellow/blue discrimination); and comparison of relative quantum catch rates in M- and L-cones, for red/green contrast (Sharpe et al. 1999).
As Clyde Hardin noted, red/green incompatibility did not have anything to do with language or with colors, but “it had to do rather with how we are made.” In his discussion of Color for Philosophers, Hardin comments that this undermined much previous thinking about color within the field of philosophy. He suggested that clinical and behavioral studies and practical “wetware” brain investigations “have begun to bear fruit of the greatest potential importance for our understanding of language, self-identity, and mental functioning” (Hardin 1988: xi). He reflected that the theoretical revolution in vision science in the 1950s that established this opponent process theory was little known outside its own field.
While it may not be immediately apparent what an understanding of opponent process theory might have for the artist or designer, an understanding of how we see and discriminate between objects is likely to be of some utility within the design process and for the visual arts. While the work of James J. Gibson (1979) and David Marr (1982) helped determine the importance of edges and shapes to image recognition, discrimination of color areas provides another powerful tool for the designer. We are now in a better position to work with the psychologists, neurologists, and others to determine just what is happening when we are looking at Itten’s color contrasts, or Yves Klein’s blue color field paintings, on a physiological level. Determining why task efficiency is enhanced in offices of certain colors (Kwallek, Soon, and Lewis 2007) may have a basis in how we are made as well as in what we are acculturated to.
The linkage between opponent process theories of color vision and how cultures talk about color was seen by Berlin and Kay (1969), who had shown how basic color terms could be mapped across languages. They saw a correlation between the elementary red or green that is neither bluish nor yellowish and the sequencing with which color terms appear in language development. Hardin and Maafi (1997) describe how this work on color terms linked to the work of Ewald Hering in the late nineteenth century and the work by Hurvich and Jameson in the mid-twentieth century. While the consensus appears now to suggest some connection between physiological determinants and culturally specific languages, there have been challenges to both the work of Berlin and Kay and to the opponent process theory model (Saunders and Brakel 1997). Saunders (2005) criticized the research methods of Berlin and Kay and suggested that the widespread acceptance of their model indicated a “suspension of critical faculties” that drew on a “sychophantic adulation of scientistic methodology” among other factors. Her challenges generated much discussion in related scientific communities, but work on the mapping of numbers of basic color categories has continued and is now published as part of The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Kay and Maafi 2011).
As well as recognizing that even in the fields of science the thinking about topics like color vision moves on at some pace, we also need to recognize that what we know about color and its perception has an interpretive or meaning framework that might be subject to a similar process of changing ideas. In relation to color meaning and interpretation there are additional social and cultural factors to take into account, reflecting deeply embedded historical differentiators as well as global influences in the contemporary period. The very different subjective readings given to different colors by different cultures are explored elsewhere in this book, but need to be kept in mind throughout this discussion. David Batchelor’s identification of “chromophobia” (2000) came at a moment just before digital color became the ubiquitous medium of advertising and global communication. Advertising used to be in print, and apart from billboards and glossy magazines, color was expensive. Now we use the web and electronic displays, which use an entirely different means of color rendering that is as cheap as black and white and relies upon a very different color system. Colored light is not quite the same as colored stuff, but there are still levels of perceptual work that give differentiation and gratification. And in the context of global trade, the ubiquity of the palette for technological goods has not yet been broken. Knowing that brain gray is the term used to denote the absence of stimulus into the visual cortex from the retina suggests we might want to be careful about the use of medium gray.
COLOR, SPACE, AND PLACE
When thinking specifically about color in relation to the designed environment, there is a balance to be made between local color use related to indigenous materials and accessible color codes that might be meaningful beyond the local. In the fields of architecture and urbanism, the tendency is to presume operation as part of an international community. While locally sourced building materials were used in the past to produce the color and identity of place, this model is being undermined in the globally scaled culture of contemporary practice. To counter this tendency, the following studies are notable for reminding us of how color meaning adds to the perceptual experience of space and place.
In the 1960s, Kevin Lynch (1960) established the basis on which we describe cities and ascertain their legibility. Of his five main elements, nodes, paths, and edges all draw upon the edge detection or two-dimensional sketching associated with Gibson’s and Marr’s models of visual perception, but landmarks and districts both have scope to be differentiated by color as much as by the other key determinants of visual perceptual processing. Lynch developed an index of “imageability” from his study of the experience and visual memories of residents and visitors and suggested that while it is the “traversability of the city,” the paths, which underscore its success or failure, landmarks and districts provide the key features for the visual memories for imagining the place.
In counterpoint to this proposition of traversability as a key determinant of place legibility is the notion that some places have a particular color. This is clearly evident where local building materials give a clear steer to the perceptual system, but historic changes can subvert our understanding. Bente Lange made an analysis of the colors of buildings in Rome in the eighteenth century (1993), and found that they were not the golden hue they are now, but were a polychromatic mix of blues, greens, and greys as well as the color of the untreated stone. What this suggests is that we must be particularly careful to ground subjective analysis of color meaning or interpretation on the basis of some certainty.
If the changes wrought by history can be put to one side, the work undertaken by Lenclos and Lenclos (2004) on the geography of color might add to useful knowledge about the “chromatic personalities” of regions and cities across the world. They mapped the combinations of light, geology, climate, local traditions, and vernacular techniques that give expressive color distinction to different places, and which “contribute to the affirmation of national, regional or local identity.” A related piece of work by Swirnoff has analyzed the light quality of cities to produce a typology that distinguished bright cities like Santa Fe from shadow cities, such as Stockholm. In combination with building materials and other external visual clues, the light quality and atmospheric conditions are one of the key determinants on how things are actually perceived in specific environments.
Hemelryk, Gammack, and Gammack (2005) conducted an online survey with worldwide respondents between November 2004 and January 2005 that asked “If Sydney [or one of Hong Kong or Shanghai] was a color, what would it be?” Respondents were asked to select from a reference palette of twenty colored swatches covering a full range of hues, including white, black, and gray. Follow-up questions asked for why the choice had been made. The answers from the Sydney-based respondents, commenting on Sydney and Hong Kong, indicate that the predominance of blue choices for Sydney were based on reasoning that the city was clear, clean, vibrant, and beautiful. Comments were made on environmental features such as the harbor, sky, natural environment, with many referring to the quality of light.
In contrast, the colors of contemporary commerce within the city draw more mixed responses. Kobayashi (1990) has looked at the associations between color combinations and key image words used in branding, particularly in relation to the advertising hoardings of Tokyo. He reports both a fascination for and a mistrust of how color and image are used. He sees scope to use conventions drawn from this work as a part of the branding of the city itself, and thus contribute to the underlying identity of the place and its social-symbolic value. Symbolic meanings increasingly form a basis for brands and for a city; its brand serves as a persona—it can engage “affective perceptions” such as friendliness, attractiveness, trust, and integrity. There is, however, the underpinning dilemma related to the difference between the colors of light and the colors of stuff. The award-winning work by Laura Bayliss of Building Design Partnership in the United Kingdom (2008) exemplifies the impact of colored light in the city at dark, but also reminds us that the range of colors achievable through the use of light is at a distance to the range of colors seen when we see material in daylight.
The difference between colored stuff and colored light presents what might be seen as a problem for design. The specification of materials, particularly in a global manufacturing or construction environment, requires specificity and exactitude. Over the past century, a range of methods has been developed for managing specification of color, and several of the systems have come to incorporate different finishes. The Munsell system developed through his 1929 Book of Color (Munsell 1929) has contributed several standards to U.S. industry. The RAL system, originated in 1927 (RAL 1927), became the standard system for central Europe, while the Natural Color System (NCS) (1979), developed in 1946, was adopted as the Swedish standard in 1979. The Pantone system, first published in 1963, has gained dominance in the graphic arts industry (Pantone 1963). The Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE) (2000) developed the first mathematically derived color space, which has come to provide the most constant referent point for other color systems. Along with the International Color Consortium (ICC) (2005), British Standards Institute (BSI) (2010), and the International Standards Organisation (ISO), it provides widely accessible standards for the use of color in a wide range of industrial and manufacturing contexts.
Urban space presents the viewer with a complex visual landscape comprising elements that can be defined by a number of color systems that draw upon these international and national standards. Specific standards apply to many aspects of the built environment such as the colors used on road signs, industrial finishes, and other materials. There are now ubiquitous colors such as the yellows or reds of post boxes, the orange of shipping buoys, or the brown of historic or tourist attraction signage. The majority of the colors selected for such signs draw upon the base group of distinguishable colors: the red that has no green, or the blue that has no yellow, with a second set of colors drawn from the secondary mixes of brown, orange, purple. What these colors do have in common is a generally high level of saturation that places them in specific regions of CIE or other color spaces (CIE 2000).
The color systems used in this environment include the statutory color systems defined by government and institutional agencies. They are often instructional and provide visual notation to the environment in the form of road markings, traffic signs, and place names, often conforming to internationally recognized norms. Statutory color draws upon the internationally recognized color systems including BSI, RAL, DIN (1953), ISO, CIE, and Pantone to ensure consistency in use and legibility. For example, the standard colors of UK road signs are set out in Traffic Signs (H.M. Stationery Office 1963: 139), and refer to the specific red, blue, yellow, and gray BS colors, and two BS greens.
As distinct from statutory systems, material color systems in the built environment are defined by what has been built. A material system derives from and reflects the ethos and objectives underpinning the design of buildings and the infrastructure in which they are located and is influenced by town planning, design codes, and the means of construction available. Material color reflects the local or global nature of a place, and can exist either as post-hoc rationalizations of what is, or can be embedded in theoretical propositions or “design codes,” to determine what might be built.
The third system of color in the built environment is cultural. This might refer to color as applied in the form of signage or through the choice of visual embellishment of buildings and surfaces, normally through the use of paint or graphics. Cultural color can reflect deep-rooted traditions or ephemeral events, sometimes simultaneously.
The predominance of one system over another depends on the nature of the space in question and it is rare for one system to exist in isolation from others. This produces a situation where there are interrelationships set up by the viewer between systems and where particular systems predominate or recede depending on the nature of interrelationship between the user or viewer and the environment. This complex triangulation of meaning and values provides the designer with an operational field within which new forms of engagement with color may occur and through its complexity provides opportunities for identifying design questions and resolutions.
DESIGN CODES
While color systems provide a conceptual framework within which color can be described or prescribed, design codes give guidance on how color and other visual attributes should be used in specific contexts, thus providing another set of directional frameworks for the designer in the urban context. The use of design codes as a means of improving quality of the urban environment is widespread as is the body of theory supporting it (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment 2005), and they are recognized by the UK government as a means of improving urban quality. Design codes are typically either statutory or guidance-based.
Statutory design codes are identified in documents such as Building Regulations and provide a framework within which construction takes place. Certain constructional elements may fall within statutory color systems, for example, warning signs, but others are the result of aesthetic and technical choices that are not color-critical, therefore they may vary within a given context. The purpose of a statutory instrument is to ensure that design decisions meet certain minimum levels of conformity or performance. This results in readily identifiable visual elements recurring within the environment, typically in the form of information or instructional media. Statutory code can also be applied to the design of instruments of the state, for example, the emergency services and armed forces to produce a level of consistent aesthetic.
A supplementary layer of information in addition to statutory instruments is provided by Guidance notes. These may be used to control the visual appearance of the built environment, by specifying the color of the building and the specific materials that are to be used for construction. Guidance directives were originally designed to ensure that visual conformity was maintained in prestigious developments. A notable example is the guidance for the stucco façades of the Nash Terraces in Regent’s Park, London, which have to be painted either white or cream. This specification is covered by a covenant drawn up following completion in 1825. Since the introduction of Conservation Areas to the United Kingdom in 1967, local controls can now be enforced to preserve the aesthetic quality of an area, including many elements that compose architectural character. In the United Kingdom, the use of design guidance has gained prominence since the 1970s as a means of ensuring consistency in the visual environment. This is often done through the control of acceptable building materials that deliver a predictable tonal palette as well as in the formal characteristics of the built environment. The most recent high-profile examples of design codes are those prescribed for Seaside in Florida and Poundbury in Dorset. In Poundbury all aspects of the external appearance of the built environment, from “traditional” architectural styles, relationship between buildings, materials used, and colors chosen for front doors are controlled by the Poundbury Building Code, drawn up and enforced by the Duchy of Cornwall. In the Crewkerne Easthams Development Design Code (Prince’s Foundation 2006) there are minimal references to color, with specification of “natural,” or buff-colored stone, and of doors being painted in ‘sympathetic’ colors. Such codes control all aspects of the built envelope, from the distance between buildings to their form and the materials used and their disposition.
The use of design codes has been extensively promoted by theorists, has been used in various forms since the Renaissance, most recently by the American New Urbanist movement, and has also been both promoted and tested by organizations including the UK’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). CABE (2005: 15) defines design codes as “a document that sets rules for the design of a new development.” These codes initially emerged from technical requirements derived from pragmatic issues such as fire resistance. Wren’s building codes for London, developed after the Great Fire of 1666, defined extensive elements of the urban environment, including building height, facing materials, and window size and proximity. Through technical means this defined the aesthetic of the new city that emerged.
Latterly design codes have increasingly become aesthetic documents, a means to impose some form of visual order on development. The result has been a delamination between technical and aesthetic concerns. The aesthetic objectives of design codes are intended to produce control and consistency within developments. This can take many forms, however, typically it will define building mass and building interrelationship, acceptable roof and façade forms including fenestration types, along with approved material palettes. The level of control is dependent on the objectives of the designer, but can extend to defining the colors of any external finishes and whether illuminated elements such as signage are acceptable.
Design codes can be read as a means of bureaucratizing design, replacing individual creative freedom with a set of rules that produce collective coherence. Design codes tend to normalize design, removing extremes, and emphasizing shared (or imposed) value systems. Unless design guides are applied intelligently, conformity can result in banality, where design innovation is replaced with compliance.
As well as the influence of design codes and guidance on the choices that may lead to the selection of color within the built environment, color in urban space and architecture is typically also a byproduct of the building processes, where the palette develops from the natural condition of materials, as well as being a clearly applied medium with a designed objective.
The construction process is governed by design instructions placing available technology within a timetabled program. Decisions are made in advance of the build and involve specification from known materials or components. The choice of materials is governed by budget and the decisions of the design team. This tends toward a convergence within any era, reflecting dominant taste. Taste affects the detail of design; however, technology informs fundamental shifts in the material nature of the environment.
We have already referred to the impact on London of the transformations that took place as a result of the design codes implemented after the Great Fire of 1666, where the city was transformed from a black-and-white timber city, to a brick-and-stone city, an aesthetic transformation driven by the technological requirement for fireproof buildings. More widespread transformation due to procurement influences took place in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century when locally sourced building materials were replaced by mass-produced industrialized materials, local stone was replaced by brick, local roofing materials replaced by mass-produced Welsh slate. This removed the direct connection between building construction and place. Buildings were no longer made of the place they were sited in but became specified and global objects. Increasingly, this distancing from site and building process has become the norm.
Components are now globally sourced, and it is common for all the key elements of a building to be produced in widely dispersed places, brought together through a coordinated building process. A result of this is an increasingly homogenous urban environment.
The route to building procurement is highly structured, and design decisions are distanced from delivery. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Plan of Work for Architect’s design services summarizes the process into twelve primary stages including the initial commissioning of a project, which provides a structure for the delivery of a building process but does not engage with aesthetic issues. The selection of materials and color is developed and resolved early in the process, with specification of materials and components usually happening well before the scheme emerges out of the ground. Judgments relating to color and tonality, particularly with self-colored materials, are very difficult to change as the construction process progresses beyond the production of tender documents (the seventh of the twelve stages). Decisions relating to building materials are informed by numerous pressures on the design team. Choice may be affected by availability, cost, timescale, performance, as well as aesthetic, and the design process is often under significant time pressures where known solutions are favored.
Beyond buildings, significant areas of the urban environment are the result of default decisions with little or no aesthetic consideration. Road surfaces are governed by standardized signage and notation criteria, which may extend to coloring the road surface itself, and the road pavement is defined by technical criteria associated with wear resistance, adhesion, and cost. Street lighting is defined by the minimum cost of delivering defined illumination levels onto the pavement surface. Color-rendering quality is of secondary importance to running cost. The (orange) high-pressure sodium lamps that characterize much British urban space are a direct result of this, having replaced (blue/green) mercury lamps, a change driven by the running costs. In situations where color rendering is judged important, changes to the choice of lamp result, justified by the cost/benefit decisions. So while significant changes can take place around us in the built environment merely by changing the light we use to render our cities, how are contemporary designers responding to the challenge of bringing color to bear upon our lived experience?
CASE STUDIES IN COLOR
To enable us to develop our thinking about color in urban space, we explored how two design teams have realized and theorized color within the urban context. Maccreanor Lavington Architects (Rotterdam) uses road paint as a cheap transformative medium for urban intervention, and Dashing Tweeds samples urban color as the development palette for traditional tweed fabrics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with both design teams as the basis of accounts of their approach to color.
Traditional means of engaging with the design of urban space have typically concentrated on the form or the function of the building or space under scrutiny, rather than considerations of color and its role in determining the quality or utility of the environment. This is reinforced by the training given in schools of architecture and town planning, where chromatic design does not form part of the curriculum. The development of urban design as a discipline aligned with architecture and town planning has opened opportunities for exploration of new areas of design practice, along with the willingness of professional practitioners to engage with unconventional media and transdisciplinary modes of design.
A questioning of the appropriate and possible means of engaging with the representational possibilities of the city underpin the case studies described here. Importantly, elements that were previously considered either banal or outside the remit of designers have entered the designers’ consideration. The language of signage and urban materiality reappears in unexpected form as a re-representation of the city. Both of the case studies discussed here use different media to engage with the city and take the urban color palette and develop it in different ways.
MACCREANOR LAVINGTON ARCHITECTS: DUBLIN’S PARLOUR
The architectural practice Maccreanor Lavington is based in Rotterdam and London. It has successfully developed award-winning architectural schemes in parallel with innovative urban design work, winning the Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2008 and the Masterplanning Architects of the Year in 2009, among many other accolades.
Dublin’s Parlour was an architectural competition proposal for a temporary and flexible urban public space designed to accommodate up to 6,000 people exiting an adjacent concert venue. The project location was complex and indeterminate, incorporating a surface that covered the hole left by six-story-deep foundations for an unfinished office tower, unified by a thin layer of asphalt, the most neutral of all urban materials, defining the site as a dark gray surface. The drivers of low cost and speedy delivery led the design team to explore alternative solutions toward defining the space. The architects realized that schemes relying on traditional forms of space and place definition, including building of enclosures or conventional structures, would be too expensive, insufficiently flexible, and take too long to realize. The requirement was for a scheme with maximum impact that could be delivered quickly, and on a low budget, driving an innovative solution.
Analysis of possible quick and cheap means for redefining space informed the choice of color as the primary medium for the scheme. This built on research work into visual impact undertaken by members of the design team. They reasoned that while color can be extremely visually dominant, it can at the same time be formally and spatially neutral. A painted surface can define movement, patterns, and activities, or simply exist as a surface. The design team explored marking patterns on highways and airport runway taxiways, while referencing artists including Barnett Newman and Robert Morris. Cost analysis confirmed that road paint can be applied for approximately $1.20/square foot, offering an ideal means of transforming the urban surface at minimal cost. As architect Kevin Logan said, “It’s cheaper than pizza!” Color is used to produce a proposal that is striking yet functionally ambiguous, subverting the statutory coding implied by the use of road paint, encouraging spontaneous use and redefinition of the space. The visual dominance of the resulting colorful street surface is counteracted by its neutrality of form.
The use of color as a primary architectural element is made explicit by the architect’s design concept statement, referring to “bold” pattern and color as “a dynamic mechanism to organise and articulate the space, offering structure to events and activities, enabling orientation and adjusting the scale of the space.” The layering of patterns and colors was designed to form a composition that works at different scales, with areas of detailed “patternation” encouraging intimate engagement balanced by extensive color fields (Plate 5). The shifts in the scale of pattern elements enable the user to develop an understanding of how to use the space, through embedded visual clues, referring to pattern and color as “subconscious markers” that set out “how the space and adaptive elements…maybe [sic] used.”
The assertion is made that the strong and bold colors used were selected to “complement local light levels.” They drew their influences from the historical northern European architectural traditions of the painted façades to articulate and add depth to the surfaces. The color was realized through the use of road paints and the materials and technologies used for sports surfaces. The architects suggest that this will enable the surface patterns to be reworked in the future, perhaps as an arts commission, although this might undo their careful articulation of the pattern elements.
The designers’ statement of concept for the scheme reinforces what might be seen as an overlap between disciplinary practices. While operating initially from the perspective of the architect, the practice demonstrates that an ability to absorb and reconfigure numerous references and visual forms underpins this scheme. Essentially what we see here is a design solution that is focused on presenting an opportunity for a cultural visual system, based on the articulation of color and pattern, to act as the unifying aesthetic driver of the scheme. While its conceptual framework of subconscious markers could provide a powerful tool for ensuring the space is memorable and distinctive, drawing upon elements of Lynch’s theory of place (1960), the prospect of a reworking of these distinguishing features by later arts commissions might render the intervention of Maccreanor Lavington less long-lived than it deserves.
A fascination with the use of the color of the city also informs the work of Dashing Tweeds, who is reframing the traditional look and use of tweed to meet the demands of twenty-first-century urban life. Dashing Tweeds is designed by photographer Guy Hills and weaver Kirsty McDougall. They have taken a palette and transformed its representation through changing its medium. Dashing Tweeds uses urban color to inform its range of innovative clothing and cloth and claims that it is “inspired by the colors of London, from the wet pavements of Piccadilly to the green parks of St. James.”
The traditional form of tweed is recast through the introduction of contemporary elements including yarns in colors not normally used in the production of this fabric, with colors derived from road paint and signage, as well as the dominant background tones of asphalt and construction materials, and the inclusion of reflective material within the yarns. The designers’ intention is to establish a contemporary urbanity, a collective identity derived from context. They note that “for color fidelity samples of double yellow-lines and red routes were chiselled up and replicated to produce the yarn shades of the city.” They have developed a unique weave that uses a wool worsted and reflective yarn that they call Lumatwills™. By day these tweeds appear as a combination of different colored yarns. By night, however, hidden reflective fibers are revealed under illumination (Plates 6 and 7), “offering an inventive and stylish solution to attire for the pedestrian, cyclist or scooter rider.” They describe this as “Capturing the urban zeitgeist in a fabric.”
The design result of Dashing Tweeds differs from the Dublin Parlour scheme in that the color is used as a palette, introduced into an unexpected medium, rather than as a medium that is reframed in its normal context. The juxtaposition of traditional design elements and production methods with advanced, overtly contemporary materials, and modern tailoring, restate the condition of contemporary urban space. Dashing Tweeds is driven by the context of early twenty-first-century urban life, where elements are continuously recontextualized. The color and form of road markings reappear as design elements of the woven fabric, the tonality of building materials forming the background weave.
By reframing the city into a new medium, the wearer can become part of the city, simultaneously expressing belonging to a collective place and social group, while also expressing individuality through the particular choice of garment and the contemporary ways in which this is used. Garments are designed for specific urban uses, for example, cycling, business accessories, and so on, reinforcing the identity of the clothing as urban while reframing the reference point of the wearer and viewer. The Lumatwill™ Cape is highly reflective and Teflon-treated to allow water to roll off if caught in the rain. The call to cultural systems again is expressly made in its statement that it was “Initially available in the yellow raver design as a play on the high visibility vest worn by emergency workers.”
REFLECTIONS ON CASE STUDIES
While ambiguity is a defining characteristic of contemporary design practice, reflecting the move away from the certainties of Modernism, the givens of the human form and human physiology and psychology do also have a bearing on the success of these projects. The story of the intentions of the artist or designer starts to have a powerful role in the branding of exclusivity or reusability. The nature of this practice is that all elements and media can be used as critical forms for expression. We suggest that the Dublin Parlour scheme and Dashing Tweeds designs engage with contemporary qualities of urban life, reframing traditional or everyday color through design processes that reengage the viewer with color in new ways. They demonstrate how the use of color as a primary design element is again emerging as a theme, one that is highly malleable and that operates at a fundamental level in the design process.
In contrast to this reengagement with color through these two cases, there appear to be tensions between the notion of cultural color systems, place-making, and global procurement, exacerbated by the way lived experience is mixed with the images relayed by communications devices and global electronic media. Simultaneous global and local experiences are becoming normal, creating new forms of visual experience, where the real is mixed with or mediated by the virtual, with each condition having its own color system.
The recent phenomena of Second Life proposed a parallel virtual world as a mirror to real space. As any visitor to Second Life will notice, however, a purely virtual world lacks the visual richness of reality. Colors are brighter and more defined, but the lack of dirt, shadow variation, weather, and diurnal change produces a visually static and sterile environment. The lack of restriction in choice of architectural materials leads to a consistent and banal urban simulation. This directly contrasts with reality where material choices are directly informed by performance and cost constraints that drive architectural and design innovation. Gravity and weathering are crucial architectural drivers that virtual worlds lack.
Much of the work on color described above is currently at the margins of curricula, outside the mainstream of design education. Despite the core aspect of color as a defining characteristic enabling visual distinction between objects, and its increasingly important role in branding and place-making, color as a topic of study does not feature clearly within the benchmarks for professional education in the fields of architecture or art and design in the United Kingdom.
British and European architectural education is governed by a European Union (EU) directive (2005). At no point is color mentioned directly as a design consideration, rather it appears only as an implied component within aesthetic requirements and knowledge of fine arts. The directive on architectural education is intended as a framework within which local interpretation and practice can operate, consequently there are wide variations in how architectural education is delivered throughout Europe. All providers do address the criteria of ensuring the ability to create designs that satisfy the aesthetic and technical requirements of construction and use, and embed an understanding of how the fine arts influence architectural design. The third key criteria is the understanding of the relationship between people and buildings.
Similarly in the field of art and design, the UK Quality Assurance Agency (QAA 2008) Subject Benchmark for bachelor’s degrees with honors in Art and Design indicates the focus of study in the field as upon “the conception, production, promotion and dissemination of the outcomes that constitute our visual culture.” Design is referred to as covering “all aspects of decision-making in relation to the aesthetic, operational, user, market, production and/or manufacturing characteristics of artefacts and systems.” While drawing ability is highly regarded as a prerequisite skill, and the acquisition of technical skills in discipline-specific materials and processes is cited, there is no explicit reference to color. While subject-specific knowledge and understanding are considered to be fundamental, the focus of the benchmark is more directed to the graduate’s ability to act rather than to know.
COLOR IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
Given the investment from other fields into understanding color and its role in everyday vision, in cultural activity, and its supposed role as a key component of visual creativity, the absence of focus on it within the education sphere is interesting. Whether this reflects the assertion that colorists are born, not made, as claimed in Itten’s Art of Color, or the disinclination to explore the base components of creativity—too much analysis leads to paralysis—a key question remains. For designers, and those that educate them, the challenge must be to consider what level of conscious engagement with color knowledge and theory are sufficient for professional operation in a global context.
We see color and color stories becoming integral to product branding and location positioning. We know that there are arguments for cultural color systems that relate to local differentiation in relation to preference or perception. Material systems can be manipulated to both reinforce and break cultural location specificity, and statutory systems can themselves become part of the cultural frame. Beyond the management of color within the design sphere, the industrial context of global commerce requires designers to have some fluency with specification models such as the international color space nomenclatures. And understanding how the eye works, even if as background understanding, can help to reinforce design decisions. While the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a massive rise in “gray goods,” the carriers of electronic color data that subvert the experience of “stuff,” the role of gray within the built environment has become all-pervasive. Gray is the color of concrete, of steel, and of neutrality. Gray is both the color of the dead brain, and the color against which we can see color.
Color, existing as a medium that lies outside the definition of standard academic curriculum, has the advantage of freedom of interpretation. This is potentially a liberating condition. In very tightly prescribed areas such as architecture, the ability to engage with areas of knowledge that are not defined is welcome. However, the converse side of this situation is that no space is set aside in the curriculum to study the subject.
It seems evident that knowledge of color theory and practice is a potential benefit to design practitioners, but this needs to be as an area that creates potential synergies with other areas of practice, not as a normative means of creating conformity. The case studies explored above illustrate how understanding some of the contextual conditions of color can inform design decisions, even when the operational color palette is extremely limited. The cross-disciplinary benefits of understanding a fundamental issue such as color are exciting, and could be seen as an area of shared knowledge that could facilitate interaction between different areas of practice, a goal that has eluded design practice with increasing professional specialization.
If design is to operate fully within a global context, greater understanding of how color works beyond the realms of personal experience might be an important part of future practice.
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