The On and Off Relationship of Architecture with Colour
Photo: The Author
In 2019, we are celebrating the centenary of the Bauhaus. No other school has had such an influence on the development of art, design and architecture.
While trying to survive the tensions of being in the crossfire of politics, industry and ideological streams, the teachers at the Bauhaus, under the visionary leadership of Walter Gropius, were radically breaking away from the thinking and colourful visual expressions of the time. In order to build a new and pure society out of the disaster and senselessness of the First World War, liberated from the restraints of the past hierarchical system, and integrated in the fast developing industrialization process, Gropius’s holistic view of a Gesamtkunstwerk, the unity of art and technique, led to new experimental ways of teaching and designing. It is well documented that the Bauhaus changed its focus several times during the three phases of the school, from Weimar (1919-25) to Dessau (1925-32) to Berlin (1932-33), in addition to the various directions pursued by faculty members. Despite these challenges, we can still see the results of their teaching today, especially in architecture.
The clean white box, erected from prefabricated concrete walls, flat roofs and metal frames for windows, reduced the cost and time to build houses for large developments. And the demand was huge as, during war time, housing programs came almost to a standstill. The white rectangular boxes were not a new invention. The short lived de Stijl movement, which started in 1917 in Holland with protagonists such as Mondrian, van der Leck, Rietveld, Oud and Theo van Doesburg, allowed only vertical and horizontal straight lines, as described in the 1918 De Stijl Manifesto. For their first point, the authors state:
"There is an old and a new consciousness of time. The old is connected with the individual. The new is connected with the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal is revealing itself in the world-war as well as in the art of the present day."
The belief in the “universal” also reduced the use of colour to the primary colours red, yellow and blue, as well as black, white and grey. This urge for standardization, finding norms and rules for all kinds of things, was typical for the time, leading to Ostwald’s colour system and the proposal of Ido, as a world language. Lower case typography, instead of upper and lower case exemplified by Herbert Beyer’s 1925 Universal alphabet is an example of simplified a font design. Although understandable from that normative perspective, it was a formalized and dogmatic typographic system that would not stand the test of time. However, white architecture, devoid of any colour, has persisted until today, and for some architects, like Richard Meier, it became a signature style.
While the idea of white simplicity, clarity and rectangular geometry in architecture started after the First World War, the absence of colour can be traced back to the Reformation, starting around 1500, when ostentation of any kind was discouraged. Before that time, going back to the buildings of antiquity, colour was a common feature of architecture.
One important factor in the use of colour in buildings is that, historically, colour was expensive, hard to get and not necessarily long-lasting. The ease (and detachment) of buying colours at a hardware store today is a recent phenomenon. Originally, colours had to be sourced from animals, plants or precious stones. Lapis lazuli is a blue stone that was only found in Afghanistan. Indigo, as the name suggests, came from India. The Blackwood or Bloodwood tree, which yielded a deep blue dye, grew only in Campeche, Mexico. During the Renaissance, port cities such as Venice had better access to imported dyes from the orient than inland cities such as Florence. As a result, Florentine artists established a tradition of drawing, while artists in Venice specialized in colourful paintings.
In ancient Greece and Rome – and even more so during the time of the Pharaohs, the Persians and Middle Eastern civilizations – palaces and gardens were beautifully decorated with large-scale murals and mosaics, as many relicts prove today. Scientific research has also revealed that many statues were brightly painted, as were temple friezes and columns. The tradition of highly decorated interiors continued up to the Renaissance.
In addition, colour was seen as a sign of wealth or noble status. The purple togas of emperors and consuls in ancient Rome were coloured with a dye extracted from small mollusks found only in the Tyrian Sea. One gram of this colour required about 10,000 snails.
Returning to the lack of colour that has been a feature of architecture for the past 500 years or so, the first incidents of “white washing” happened during the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, marking a schism between the Lutheran Protestants and the Roman Catholics. When Catholic churches fell into Protestant hands, they were stripped bare of statues, stained glass, paintings of saints and other religious content. In this iconoclastic endeavor, not only were paintings removed, but walls were painted white, so that the parishioners would not be distracted from their belief and closeness to God, as Jonathan Glancey so impressively describes in “The Land of Colour.” Even today, Protestant churches are fairly simple and maintain minimal décor.
The Reformation was followed by the Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation, which ended in the Baroque period. Absolute monarchy and a triumphant church once again asserted their authority over the individuals who had gained recognition and autonomy during the Renaissance. Baroque was characterized by the desire to evoke emotions by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, through sensuous richness, vitality, exuberance, motion and light as well as colour. Buildings were painted in pastel colours as an expression of heightened sensual experience, together with a theatrical orchestration of architecture, sculpture, painting and light effects. Curiously, there is a recent trend to paint the interiors of Baroque churches white, which helps to accentuate the curvature of the ornamentation and the play of light and shadow.
View onto the exterior of the Slaight Performance Hall.
Photo Source: Gerald Querubin Entro
The Baroque era ended dramatically with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. As a reaction to the uncontrolled emotionality of Baroque and the subsequent Rococo architecture, the Classicist movement reintroduced the formal strength and clarity of Greek and Roman temples. When architects and artists travelled to Greece, they found only ruins that were stripped of any colour, having been exposed to the elements over the centuries. They overlooked – or were unaware of – the fact that the ancient temples were originally richly painted and decorated. Therefore the idea of bare stone edifices became the standard for any neo-classicistic building, such as the British Museum in London, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The only variation was to paint the building white, as in the case of the White House in Washington, D.C. The first Classicist building in Paris was the Panthéon. Its builder, Germain Soufflot, studied and measured the monuments in Greece for five years before he started construction.
In the late 18th century, with the introduction of the Romantic period, the tide was slowly changing again. This era is characterized by the celebration of nature, beauty, self-expression and imagination, along with the rejection of rationalism, organized religion and industrialization. Buildings such as Buckingham Palace, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and Sacré-Coeur in Paris are examples of this period. While the emphasis was on ornamentation and neo-gothic structures, colour was finding its way back into architecture. Interesting in this context is the colour theory of Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher, social reformer and architect. Based on his theories, he developed the Waldorf education system, whose school buildings have no right angles and use a classroom colour scheme that changes according to the age and education level of the child.
With Art Nouveau, from 1890 to the beginning of the First World War, ornamentation, floral elements and colour were once again in full bloom. Buildings such as Olbrich’s Secession Building and Wagner’s Majolikahaus, both in Vienna, and Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona express the unconventional use of colour and ornamentation. This short period came to a halt at the beginning of the First World War, to be followed by the modern movements like De Stijl, the Bauhaus and the Vienna Modern, with Adolf Loos at the helm. In his essay “Ornament and Crime,” Loos advocates clean surfaces rather than lavish decorations. So extreme were his views that in a 1931 issue of the magazine Das Neue Frankfurt, he declares that “Bauhaus and Constructivist Romanticism is no better than the Romanticism of the ornament.”
After the Second World War, an even stronger modernism became the international norm, fostered by the invention of the steel skeleton frame for skyscrapers, and encouraged by protagonists such as Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Phillip Johnson, I. M. Pei and others. Mies, who was also the last Bauhaus director (he basically financed the school with his own money), promoted the modern style based on the dictum “Form follows function.” His well-proportioned trademark black towers began to appear in New York, Chicago and Toronto in the 50s and 60s.
Weissenhof siedlung (the Weissenhof Estate).
Photo Source: Randy Johnson
Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who created buildings such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, and planned utopian settlements such as Radiant City, was one of the few modernist architects to use colour deliberately, and even developed his own colour harmony system. Mostly however, the period after the Second World War was characterized by a lack of colour, up to this day, interrupted only by the postmodern movement that rebelled against the dogma of “Less is more,” modelling their work after a quote by Robert Venturi: “Less is a bore.”
Except for a few postmodern buildings, our inner cities are still dominated by modern skyscrapers based on functionality and optimal use of space. The facades are black, white or any shade of grey. The visual monotony recalls an observation by Vasily Kandinsky:
“Put one apple beside another and you will have two […]The increase can continue indefinitely: arithmetical process. Addition in art is enigmatic. Yellow + yellow = yellow. Geometrical progression. Yellow + yellow + yellow + yellow… = grey. The eye grows tired of too much yellow: psychological limitation. Therefore the increase becomes a decrease and arrives at zero.”
Except for buildings and spaces such as kindergarten classrooms, children’s hospitals and subway stations, where colour has always been part of the design for obvious reasons, we have only recently seen examples of colour on buildings here and there. Some are subtle, others are bold and aggressive. But new technology and materials, combined with “global” or trend colours, are changing the local and cultural vernacular of our cities. Architects and environmental designers as well as city planners have a huge responsibility in determining the colourscapes of our cities.
Colour not only plays a significant role in the cultural preservation of our cities, but can also help with the wellbeing of its inhabitants and the prevention of social degradation. Yet, research shows that very little attention is given to colour education in architecture. This lack of continuous colour education in architecture – and colour is an extremely difficult issue which needs a lot of experience – is certainly not helpful in the integrated use of colour on and in buildings. Recent examples tend to suggest that the current focus is toward ornamentation and exercises in patterns fostered through sophisticated programs, like parametric design, and through other manufacturing possibilities. Adolf Loos is turning in his grave. Colour is not a question of cost anymore, but of commitment.
In our praxis as environmental designers, we use colour purposefully to guide and orientate, but also to foster a connection with the user. Colours always create an affinity and a relationship, therefore we use colours on the façade and inside of buildings with a strong community purpose, such as the Artscape Daniels Spectrum, which became the heart of the Regent Park’s redevelopment program. We also designed with colour in Artscape’s new Weston Common, which is currently under construction, and the CIBC Aquatic Centre built for the Pan Am games in 2015. Based on a fundamental knowledge of colour theory, careful consideration of context and the historical development of an area, we can achieve sustainable colour landscapes that have a positive impact on the community.
The success of modernism over the last 100 years might have blinded us to the use of colours and to including colour design as part of planning from the beginning. We currently tend to like modern buildings with clear lines, intuitive layouts and a well-balanced colour palette of natural and neutral materials. But as a whole, there are far too many uninspiring buildings and monotonous office towers with relentlessly smooth glass facades. Will the tide change again to a better application and acceptance of colour in our cities? We hope so.