1st Edition
Full Spectrum Colour in Contemporary Architecture
Colour is architecture’s sharpest tool in the box. It has indexed everything from the feminine, cosmetic and vulgar to the pure, intrinsic and embodied. Colour has played a central role in the history of architecture. From the polychromy of the ancients to the great white interiors of high modernism. The figurative flourishes of postmodernism to the embedded sublime of contemporary building systems and facades. In contemporary architecture, colour has emerged as something powerful, both a mode of working and a political proposition. The second digital age has brought a fundamental shift in how architects engage colour. Employing the full range of colour puts forth a projective mode of action. It aids the democratisation of visual culture: opening the field to enable subjectivities, bring in new references and embrace new voices. This book explores the function of colour in contemporary architecture and argues it is not to present a vision of an idealised other world, but to prompt new imaginaries. Take in the full spectrum. Features: 100 Architects, Maya Alam, David Batchelor, Galo Canizares, Courtney Coffman, Fala Atelier, Marcelyn Gow, Sauerbruch Hutton, Sam Jacobs, Carolyn Kane, Guto Requena, Paulette Singley, Amanda Williams and Mimi Zeiger.
Articles
Arch-White
Carolyn Kane
Collective Palettes: On Colour and Identity
Courtney Coffman
Digital Colour: A Semi-Technical Reflection
Galo Canizares
Clouds of Colour
Maya Alam
Prismatic
Marcelyn Gow
Colour is a Place as Well as a Thing
Sam Jacob
When Grass is Not Green: Botanising the Asphalt
Paulette Singley
Profiles
Working with Colour
Louisa Hutton
Colour is a Sufficient Material
fala
Notes on the Velocity of Colours
David Batchelor
Colour as Activism
Guto Requena
Case studies
Colouring the Public Realm
Javier González Rivero
‘What Black is This, You Say?’ A conversation between Amanda Williams and Jasmine Benyamin
Final Word: Uncolour
Mimi Zeiger
Biography
Elena Manferdini is the principal and owner of Atelier Manferdini in Los Angeles and Graduate Programs Chair at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
Jasmine Benyamin is a historian, theorist and critic who serves as guest lecturer at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and was previously Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.