Colour is the flavour in what we see; or, as 19th-century British architect Owen Jones – best known for writing The Grammar of Ornament (1856) – put it more spiritually, ‘form without colour is like a body without a soul’.
While colour is one of the most elemental ways we comprehend the world around us, like taste, it is not a material quality objectively inherent to objects themselves. Instead, it comes into existence entirely through our brain interpreting the light waves it registers through our eyes. Without an observer to see it, colour does not exist; without an observer, it is simply a meaningless subsection of a broader spectrum of light waves endlessly bouncing off various surfaces. This gives it a peculiar and somewhat magical quality, as something that to a large degree defines the physical world around us – it imbues our surroundings with so many of the qualities that allow us to comprehend them, and gives experiential substance to what we see – but is entirely human, completely and intimately tied to (in fact, emerging directly from) our bodies and our brains.
Just as taste is that which transforms the inert materials of our environment into the immeasurable subjective complexity of flavour, colour is that which folds the shape of our surroundings into the kaleidoscopic, emotionally infused richness of perception.
The way colour inherently melds the material world with the complexity of our human experience has always lent it a formidable cultural potency. While earth pigments were applied directly to walls for much of our recent evolution, the first known example of integral colour (colour baked into the material itself) is at the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara in Egypt, where in the 27th century BC the interior walls of Pharaoh Djoser’s tomb were (and still are) clad in luminous, glossy, twinkling turquoise faience tiles that mimic the reed matting of a palace from the period. The leather loops and wooden dowels that attached the tiles to the walls rotted away over the intervening 4,600 years, but the glazed tiles remain vivid, testament to the remarkable durability of integral colour.
Colour’s capacity to affect us so intensely, to amplify experience, and the ambivalent position it holds between material and psychological reality, have often led it to be viewed with suspicion. Seen as cosmetic, superfluous and additional to an underlying structure that it might hide or obscure from the observer, it is situated in opposition to the supposedly ‘deeper’ aspects of structure and form.
While it is usually dismissed – its power rhetorically neutralised – as superficial or childish, when its power is actually recognised, it has often been characterised as overly seductive and dangerous. It is held as so unusually appealing to our senses that it undermines our cognitive and rational capacities for analysis, in the way that feminine beauty and make-up are so often cast as dangerous to masculine rectitude (and hence requiring suppression).
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The more effective colour is in appealing to people and generating a response, the more suspect it becomes. One of the most beautiful and beloved qualities of our built environment becomes increasingly deployed in direct proportion to how successful it is.
Much of this now-ingrained prejudice is a long-term consequence of a romanticised error. In the Enlightenment, when Neoclassicism was the artistic and architectural style of the intellectual community, and therefore of primary importance to the period’s self-image, the monumental buildings and statues of ancient Greece and Rome towards which its artists and architects looked for inspiration were misunderstood as having always been unadorned white marble. This absence of colour was interpreted most famously as a valiant quality by the 18th-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who saw ‘Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’.
We have known since at least 1811, when the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina was excavated, that this is totally incorrect. In fact, Greek and Roman statues and temples were covered in pigment and coloured stones – a revelation so shocking to those invested in the aesthetic clarity of Winckelmann’s adulation of white that it led to the decades-long disagreement known as the ‘Polychromy Wars’.
The simultaneous fear and ridicule of colour, allied with the veneration of white, found plenty of full-throated support in the Modern Movement as it marched across the globe, though masters like Le Corbusier never cleaved to such simple oppositions. Being himself a painter enamoured with the poetry and effect of colour, Le Corbusier created a highly prescriptive colour system he called the ‘Polychromie Architecturale’, which he continued tweaking over the course of his career.
Even architects as associated with purity and reduction as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (in the Barcelona Pavilion) and Adolf Loos (in numerous works, to highly intense and theatrical effect) found themselves a loophole by classifying coloured materials – as opposed to paint – as honest, so that using vividly saturated woods and stones was a form of decoration that adhered to an idea of Materialgerechtigkeit (‘truth to materials’). This allowed for some of the power of colour to be safely harnessed, without the moral ambiguity and reputational stain that the negative associations of cosmetics, seduction and emotion would bring to such upstandingly serious careers.
Despite the many negative associations that have accrued to the liberal usage of colour in the making of spaces over the past two centuries, the profound and intuitive resonance its skilful deployment continues to have with visitors and occupants means that it has never – in any serious way – fallen out of use.
We wanted to create a kind of recipe book celebrating some of the world’s most delicious and nourishing visual feasts, to inspire those in the architectural industry to take up the gauntlet and wield colour with more verve in their work, to encourage those who commission buildings to ask for it more and to prompt others to simply pay more attention and appreciate it with greater gusto in the built environment around them. ‘Chromatic Architecture: The Craft of Colour in Design’, £45, ribabooks.com
