Color and Design

Rene Van Meeuwen and Nigel Westbrook

Chapter Summary. The use of color in buildings has become a relatively new form of expression that has burgeoned with the impact of computer software. Color-matching techniques, combining codified computer color specification, allow designers a high level of control over color in their work. Current computer-aided design tools allow buildings to be tested and trialed using a palette of thousands of colors. In computational software terms, the pixel is the primary ordering device of color. Buildings’ components are utilized like pixels in order to build images. The implications and relations within these images exposed by the mediation of various colors within pixels create signs that infer meaning. The use of color explored in this chapter is not merely painterly, but also mediated by material typologies and predetermined swatch colors figured by selections of color, somewhere between conditions governed by historical nostalgia and contemporary fashion. Architecture has a long tradition of the use of color in designs to augment the legibility of buildings within urban contexts. More recently Lynch has described the city as a generator of mental images, while Venturi describes architecture as a series of semiotic signs that construct our environment. Poststructuralists, however, argue for a language of color that has an expressional force beyond and independent of linguistic structures or meaning. Initiated by computer-aided design software, and executed by computer-aided manufacturing, color becomes vital in the contemporary expressivity of architecture. While the digitally enhanced use of images in advertising and billboards is well-covered territory in cultural theory, this chapter will cover the implications of the color of buildings within the same context. There is no direct message, instead the outcome results in a new language of image as urban fabric, indelibly a result of historic precedent fused with computational software as an expressive medium.

Visualization software and Photoshop in particular have had a transformative effect on the use of color in architecture. This transformation can be categorized into two separate forms: a latent transformation via the agency of the software, and its everyday use within architects’ offices for image production. The other transformation is more direct—some architects use Photoshop and its inherent aesthetic and technical functions to create architecture the meaning of which has been constructed by its software realization. This study focuses specifically upon the latter condition and its contribution to a shift in architectural methodology away from both modernist psychological perceptions of space and postmodernist figural semiotics.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF USE OF COLOR IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE

The modern use of color in architecture may be traced back to the color experiments by Owen Jones at the Oriental Court of the Great Exhibition in London. Drawing upon his study of Islamic and ancient Egyptian art, and his knowledge of scientific studies on the effects of color on perception, Jones developed a color theory based around the primary colors of blue, red, and yellow, supplemented by the use of white and black. In his classic book The Grammar of Ornament, Jones put forward a series of rationalistic propositions for the use of color in architecture. Notable was his emphasis on advancing and recessive color, and the effects of complementaries upon each other.1 This positivist use of color was later paralleled in the color theories of Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, and the creation by the De Stijl artists Mondrian and Van Doesburg of a painterly space, which could be counterposed against dimensional space, as seen in Mondrian’s studio experiments with colored and tonal panels in Paris, and Van Doesburg’s Café Aubette in Strasbourg, where the diagonal color fields, employing recessive and advancing color panels, created what Van Doesburg called a “counter-composition” in relation to the spatial structure of the building. These coloristic experiments found their most developed architectural expression in the Schröder House, designed by the De Stijl architect and furniture maker Gerrit Rietveld in Utrecht in 1924.2 The rationalistic and “scientific” use of color has continued to form the dominant paradigm through the long history of modernism in the twentieth century. Color was called upon to supplement and support the architectural expression of spatial play and structural ordering. The ethical normativity of modernist discourse suppressed its inherently decorative aspects.

Within East Coast American architectural culture of the 1970s, such constraints were progressively undermined by postmodernist experimentation, ranging from Michael Graves’s early formalist rereadings of the Corbusian canon, such as the Snyderman House (Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1967–1968), where the highly colored architectural expression became a three-dimensional working out of two-dimensional cubist painting, and Peter Eisenman’s subversive revisiting of the Schröder House in his Frank House (“House VI”) in Washington, Connecticut, of 1975, where he merged the two categories of modern architecture and Abstract Expressionist art. Through the sustained critique of Robert Venturi, the modernist ethics of truth to materials and functional and structural expression was exposed as arbitrary (fictional) and productive of poorly communicative design. Venturi’s new category of the Decorated Shed became paradigmatic for a new emphasis upon the building as semantic mediation.3 The connection with the modernist canon was fully severed in later postmodernist works like Graves’s Portlandia Building (Portland, Oregon, 1976–1980), where the two-dimensional painterly image emerged onto the exterior as figurative ornament, reprising the flattened ornament of the Viennese Secessionist architecture of Olbrich, Hoffmann, and Wagner.4 Form was now to be discussed as much in terms of the optics of figural perception than of the plasticity of sculptural configuration. Space as the site for architecture was contested by surface. In this new conceptual environment, the architectural world became receptive to the possibilities that were to open up with the new pixelated surfaces of the digital.

Visualization software such as 3D Studio Max has allowed for the materiality of building being manifest as a discrete set of surfaces through the design process. Before construction method or materiality has been nominated, the visualization technique systemically treats the building form as a canvas that one might paint rather than construct through the choice of a material such as stone, brick, or concrete. Visualization software uses bitmap images to create materials—the latter are then assigned to a surface to then represent a material within a building. The material editor positions Photoshop as a primary curator of the color in buildings from the point of view of a design procedure. Architects have recognized the connection between virtual visualization and the procedure that uses Photoshop to create materials and therefore patterns, and have exploited this in their design methodology.

We will discuss two buildings as case studies that manifest the use of Photoshop in the final appearance of the building: Lilydale TAFE College, an educational facility, in Melbourne, Australia, by Lyons Architects,5 and a significant public building, the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in the nation’s capital, Canberra, by Ashton Raggatt McDougall.6 In each example the architects have deliberately used the aesthetic results of the software to acknowledge a shift in design from manual haptic methods to computational methods. Although both examples are an attempt at a visual logic that uses color to recognize cultural shifts through design practice, they are undertaken in different ways, reflecting the function of the buildings.

The Lilydale TAFE building manifests itself as a pure example of a decorated shed (Plate 43).7 All of the façades are either pixelated, or use graphically manipulated ambiguous images. Two materials are used to create the decorated effect: bricks and Colorbond steel sheet. The multicolored bricks are utilized to create a pixelated surface, and the Colorbond is used to create large graphic effects. The actual patterns and graphics remain abstract enough so that no meaning can be derived from the color effect. The primary design device, a deliberate ambiguity between two- and three-dimensionality, clearly reveals the use of Photoshop as design generator. This architectural “graffiti” is understandable to the predominately teenage users of the educational building. The building is identifiable to an audience who could be described as digital natives (a term used to describe a generation that has grown up with computers as a day-to-day device). It brings pop culture forward into the digital age, creating surfaces for which the closest analogy is the computer or television screen.

The TAFE building relies on color to achieve its design intention. This has been achieved in two different ways: the brick colors selected from the product catalogue are close in proportion to the dimensions of Photoshop pixels (see Plate 44). The transition from an image in Photoshop to an entire façade reconstructing the chosen image by utilizing the color of bricks is straightforward. Colorbond, a precoated colored metal sheet, is used to construct chromatic planes that create ambiguous graphic effect. Thus, for example, color shifts create the appearance of an archway near the building’s entry. A three-dimensional form is rendered as two-dimensional surface. This is a significant design shift mediated purely by color through the technique of Photoshop.

The National Museum of Australia, on the other hand, uses color in many different ways. Firstly, in the rear façade of one of its buildings, the AIATSIS center (see Figure19.1),8 the architects have used color in the most profound and rhetorical manner. Here the architects have taken Villa Savoye, an archetypical modernist building by Le Corbusier, constructed it almost precisely as a simulacrum of the original, and then literally, with the stroke of the mouse, painted it black. Strictly speaking, black is the absence of color; however, the point of the matter is the use of color to signify a specific meaning. In this first instance the building was copied in its entirety, literally downloaded from an architectural model website and inserted into the project. The AIATSIS building houses an institution fostering research of and by Australia’s indigenous people. Its “Not Villa Savoye” façade has a direct axial relationship with the Australian Parliament house. The architects have alluded to many different readings to explain this color change; however, the obvious and clearly defined meaning allows for a heroic modernist building from Europe to be reflecting a black face rather than a white face, in an inversion of cultural colonization.9

Figure 19.1 AIATSIS center, showing the copied Villa Savoye painted black, designed by Ashton Raggatt McDougall. Photograph by Rene Van Meeuwen, 2009.

Photoshop collage is used on the façade of the building like a form of graffiti, a significant example being the “Eternity” sign, alluding to a famous graffiti message that used to appear on the streets of Sydney.10 See Figure 19.2. In the NMA the architects have cleverly disguised this graffiti image over the entirety of the exterior surface of the main exhibition space. The façade was flattened using 3d Rhinoceros, a computer-aided manufacture software, then using Photoshop the eternity graffiti was literally stenciled across the flattened façade. Once made three dimensional the eternity graffiti, colorized into the panels of the façade, is only ever partially apparent at different moments from exterior views of the building. Here Photoshop has been used as a tool to allow the sampling of graphics and through various digital techniques their use as symbolic gesture at various scales on the building.

The other use of color is in the red surface that continually reappears through the main museum building. The use of the color red is again symbolic—implying the blood spilt during the white occupation of Australia (see Plate 45)—and is an intentional affront to the denial on behalf of historians, politicians, and media of this history. The building itself represents the institution of the museum, while the red color memorializes the political moment in time. The commissioning and construction of such a building, celebrating and elaborating on Australian history and culture while the government of the time was unable to issue a national public apology to its indigenous people, is indeed ironic. The red insists the building is not about a singular truth, but rather about revealing stories of difference. The “bloody” insertions and subtractions act as a kind of abstract counternarrative or negative rhetoric, resisting the brushing aside of these issues in the creation of the national “story.” Like a kind of architectural Wikileaks, they demand that we see the damage.

Figure 19.2 Photograph of the unwrapped façade of the Main Hall of the National Museum of Australia combined with the Eternity graffiti. Tangled Destinies, National Museum of Australia, pp. 44–45. Image courtesy of Luxford, 2002.

These short examples are musings of further research into the transformative effect that color, mediated through the computational software Photoshop, can have on a more general theory of aesthetics and meaning within the discipline of architecture. Interestingly, the net effect is a new interest in the use of digitized color to propagate this general theory, and also a borrowing from cultural practices that give signification, narrative, or meaning to particular colors or patterns. Photoshop and architecture are still in the early years of design strategies that specifically utilize such methods; however, there is no doubt that when historians and theorists of architecture write about color and contemporary architecture they will be enquiring on the use of pixels and color data.

NOTES

1. Owen Jones, “Propositions,” in The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day & Sons, 1856).

2. On the development of color theory within the Bauhas, see F. Birren, ed., Itten: The Elements of Color: A Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten (Stuttgart: Urania Verlag, 2003); H. Engels and U. Meyer, Bauhaus-Architektur, 1919–1933 (Munich: Prestel, 2001); E. S. Hochman, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (New York: Fromm, 1997). On the development of color theory within the De Stijl group, see A. Doig and A. Doin, Theo Van Doesburg: Painting into Architecture, Theory into Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); H.L.C. Jaffe, De Stijl, 1917–1931: The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); S. Fauchereau, Mondrian and the Neo-Plasticist Utopia (Barcelona: Ed. Polygrafa, 1994).

3. R. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art Press, 1966); R. Venturi, with D. Scott Brown and S. Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbol of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).

4. E. Kudalis, Michael Graves (Minneapolis: Capstone Press, 1996), 31–32; K. Vogel Nichols, P. Arnell, and T. Bickford, Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects 1966–1981 (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1982).

5. Lyons Architects is a large group practice focusing primarily on health and education projects. One partner, Corbett Lyon, spent a period working for Venturi & Scott Brown, while its chief design architect, Carey Lyon, has built upon a study of Venturi to propose a theory of “thin surface” and pixilated image.

6. Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM) is an innovative practice that grew out of a rich architectural debate in Melbourne in the late 1970s, stimulated by the writing and work of Peter Corrigan, and the influence of Robert Venturi.

7. The term derives from Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas.

8. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Studies.

9. There are also references to a mask that was used by an infamous Australian bush ranger, Ned Kelly. His mask was formed out of dark sheet metal and had a distinctive slot for his eyes. Here there is a remarkable formal similarity with the strip windows of (not the) Villa Savoye, set into their black surrounds.

10. The graffiti was spruiked around the streets of Sydney by Arthur Stace, a destitute alcoholic who found redemption in Christianity. Stace wandered the streets for thirty-seven years scrawling over a half a million times the word eternity in chalk and crayon predominantly on foot paths. This motif was made famous when Australia proudly used it in the 2000 Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.