COLORZOOM

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COLORZOOM by Michael Stradley Bachelor of Architecture Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2014

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE STUDIES AT THE

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY May 2020

© 2020 Michael Stradley. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce

and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part

in any medium now known or hereafter created.

Signature of Author: ____________________________________________________________________ Department of Architecture May 8, 2020 Certified by: __________________________________________________________________________ Hans Tursack Pietro Belluschi Teaching Fellow Thesis Supervisor Accepted by: _________________________________________________________________________ Leslie K. Norford Professor of Building Technology Chair, Department Committee on Graduate Students

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COLORZOOM Michael Stradley

Master of Science in Architecture Studies Thesis supervisor:

Hans Tursack, MArch

Pietro Belluschi Teaching Fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thesis readers:

Brandon Clifford, MArch

Assistant Professor of Architecture Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nora Schultz, MFA

Assistant Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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COLORZOOM by Michael Stradley

Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 8, 2020 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Science in Architecture Studies

ABSTRACT

COLORZOOM is an investigation into the disciplinary status of color in architecture. The design investigations of COLORZOOM pursue architectural color in both the broad context of increasingly image-driven architectural practice and a discrete historical moment in which architecture must proceed in a digital and distributed manner. COLORZOOM is a proto-pedagogy which positions color as the central driver of the design process. It proposes its series of didactic color exercises as a new curriculum for architects exploring the perception and production of color in the context of contemporary design tools.

Despite a widening void of expertise and the disappearance of color curriculum from most

architectural academies, color saturates the built environment and daily life. As the techniques and technologies of architectural production transition architecture from a practice of drawing to one of image-making, pixel and image become elevated to a status typically reserved for form and line. In the context of this disciplinary and technological shift, COLORZOOM identifies a necessity for image-making expertise. And, if a future of architectural imaging is to have a kind of tectonics, color may well be its structure. COLORZOOM attempts to wrangle with the disciplinary haiku of color – to wade through its uncomfortable mixture of light and material and culture and perception – to reposition color as an active protagonist in architectural design.

Thesis supervisor: Hans Tursack Title: Pietro Belluschi Teaching Fellow

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many, many thanks to my advisor, Hans Tursack, for taking the time to work with me, and for being a mentor and fellow traveler on this project.

Many thanks to Nora Schultz, who offered her valuable readings, insights, reactions, and intuitions -- motivated purely by some mixture of kindness and curiosity.

Many thanks to Brandon Clifford, whose practice I deeply admire and who contributed clarity, among many other things.

Thanks to the faculty across many institutions who contributed to these interests and this project (whether they knew it or not): Tobias Putrih, Nora Schultz, Jennifer Leung, Mark Goulthorpe, Jon Isherwood, Anthony Titus, Lonn Combs.

Thanks to Sheila Kennedy, for leading our strange tribe here at MIT.

Thanks to the AD cohort for sharing in these past two years with me: Anna Vasileiou, Rodrigo

Escandon Cesarman, and of course, María Esteban Casañas, whose friendship and collaboration has been a real and surprising joy.

And thanks to Katie Soule, for supporting me, for believing in my work, and for putting up with me, as always. I hope come close to returning the favor.

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C O L O R Z O O M

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C O N T E N T S

COLOR DEFINED BY A FIELD OF POINTS 48

COLOR SPECIFIC TO THE MATERIAL OF A PLACE 62

COLOR MODIFIED BY THE ACT OF NAMING 78

COLOR AS INDEX OF ASSEMBLY OR CONSTRUCTION METHODOLOGY 86

COLOR DEFINED RELATIVE TO A DIRECTIONAL VECTOR IN SPACE 102

COLOR WHICH EXISTS ONLY IN THE MIND 106

COLOR PERCEIVED BY A NON-HUMAN OR A TECHNICAL APPARATUS 110

COLOR IN MOTION OR VIEWED IN MOTION 110

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F O R W A R D

An architectural thesis offers an opportunity to gently punch back (respectfully), exerting backwards pressure on faculty, academic and studio culture, and the perceived blind spots of one’s home institution. COLORZOOM is unashamed to make its home in the SMArchS Design discipline group at MIT, and hopefully advances the argument that the core, fundamental concerns of design are legitimate and critical to architecture.

It should be declared that I began this project from a naive position: I had little understanding of color, no formal training in the area, and I suspected I would do well to correct this. As a result, it is not a permutation of the ‘competency thesis’ prevalent in architecture schools, which leverages the thesis format to showcase the author’s skill in technique and representation. If anything, it is the opposite. Any expertise perceived here was built up in short order, and the process and techniques at work here are laid bare.

To embark on a thesis which takes color as its subject is quixotic. The area of inquiry is impossibly broad and only in an impoverished state of color understanding would the proposition be accepted at all – in this sense, the thesis justifies its own existence. COLORZOOM does a few things to sidestep this pitfall of broadness and to tighten the brackets of its scope.

First, the thesis steps one degree back and away from the specific use of color by specific historical architects, which could easily dissolve into endless discussions

of taste and style. Rather, in the formulation of its design experiments and in its historical research, the thesis focuses on the physical and digital techniques of color production, and on the various approaches to color classification which formalize color into an understandable body of knowledge.

Second, the thesis is proposed as a proto-pedagogy for the color training of the 21st century architect. While the experiments here were carried out by the author (and only the author) the multi-stranded structure of the thesis isolates color in relationship to other individual, disciplinary concerns and may be read as the framework for a future course. In this way, COLORZOOM allows itself distance from the professional practice of architecture, instead emerging from and commenting on the culture of contemporary architectural academy.

A reader may fairly question if what you see before you is a thesis at all. Over the course of my formal architectural education, I have encountered few terms in the architectural lexicon as fraught and nebulous as the this one: thesis. Within the

architectural academy, the word is often cheaply deployed to justify a particular forms of research or methodologies, while marginalizing others as “not thesis.” However, in the hands of the earnest students and guides, the format’s ambiguity is precisely its strength, allowing one to test the edges of the discipline with the advising faculty emerging as fellow travelers on a shared line of inquiry.

Finally, a footnote is required to mark the historical moment surrounding this thesis’s production. Spring 2020, coincided with the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic. In January and Feburary, news unfolded abroad and work continued without interruption at MIT -- in March, studios were abruptly vacated, course travel cancelled, and classes adapted to remote formats. My formal education as an architect has been strangely circular, bookended by the financial crisis of 2008-09, and now the novel coronavirus of 2020.

While this thesis does not attempt to alter its content to digest the state of the world in real time (no doubt, countless others will take on that particular project), this thesis did shift its media and format, pursuing an architecture made primarily of images and

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animations, and pivoting to the display format of a website in lieu of a public review or exhibition. The website can be understood as the native format and context of the project and is hosted at michaelstradley.com/colorzoom. The work there will continue to evolve and grow beyond the marking of time which this document represents. Faced with the prospects of graduating into a strange, uncanny world, I think of one of my earliest mentors in architectural education, who would challenge first-year students with an architectural koan of sorts: thesis begins in first year. This thesis aspires to work that spirit – returning to the center of architecture and of one’s own aesthetic obsessions, reaffirming an elemental concern of the discipline, and preparing to meet a transformed world with equal parts new and re-newed forms of architectural practice.

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C O L O R Z O O M

COLORZOOM is an investigation into the disciplinary status of color in architecture. The design investigations of COLORZOOM pursue architectural color in both the broad context of increasingly image-driven architectural practice and a discrete historical moment in which architecture must proceed in a digital and distributed manner. COLORZOOM is a proto-pedagogy which positions color as the central driver of the design process. It proposes its series of didactic color exercises as a new curriculum for architects exploring the perception and production of color in the context of contemporary design tools.

Despite a widening void of expertise and the disappearance of color curriculum from most architectural academies, color saturates the built environment and daily life. As the techniques and technologies of architectural production transition architecture from a practice of drawing to one of image-making, pixel and image become elevated to a status typically reserved for form and line. In the context of this disciplinary and technological shift, COLORZOOM identifies a necessity for image-making expertise. And, if a future of architectural imaging is to have a kind of tectonics, color may well be its structure. COLORZOOM attempts to wrangle with the disciplinary haiku of color – to wade through its uncomfortable mixture of light and material and culture and perception – to reposition color as an active protagonist in architectural design. Color in the present-day architectural academy is theorized and under-discussed. Design references are blindly color-sampled and reproduced, as is the case with the ever-present millennial-pink (turned GSD-pink), the mass-hypnosis of

Color-Form Design Relationship

COLORZOOM Paradigm

Form-Color Design Relationship

Existing Paradigm Form Form Material Material Program Program Application of Color Color Design Artifact Design Artifact

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ubiquitous color-gradient use, arbitrarily colorized poché, and countless other color tropes. Students and critics alike appear to have an unspoken agreement that in the hyper-saturated 2020 architecture studio, color is devoid of meaning and not to be discussed. In even the most respected academies, color has devolved into a stylistic device to produce (at best) a tonal atmosphere and to signal one’s vague allegiance/ association to an in-vogue practice. This is no surprise given that color theory and color design have all but disappeared from the architectural academy, replaced by technically-inflected curriculum under an academic funding regime which dismisses the research value of architecture’s internal, disciplinary concerns.

The professional practice of architecture and building has undergone a similar shift in the second-half of the 20th-century, as the study of color slowly leeched out of the architectural academy. Where once faculty of architecture found kindred spirits in fine art painting, often sharing color research agendas, architects now graduate into building practice without adequate training in the theory and deployment of color. Color design fluency, a realm of expertise now relinquished to paint corporations, decorators, and marketing firms, is critical to the execution of good building. Studies in psychology and psychosomatic medicine show the concrete influence a visual environment has on the well-being of its inhabitants – the question of color is not purely academic, and it encompasses artificial lighting, daylighting, and their associated human health effects.

An understanding of color and its effects is as much a study of human perception and subjectivity as it is a study of the physical world. Viewed under microscope, the human retina contains two distinct types of receptors: rods and cones. The rods outnumber the cones roughly 120 million to 5 million. Rod receptors send a signal to the optic nerve regardless of color difference, although they are especially sensitive to blue-green light, explaining the perceptual effect causing blue-green objects to appear brighter than red or orange objects in low-light conditions. Cone receptors are color specific, split into yellow-sensitivity, green-sensitivity, and violet-sensitivity. A perceived color is primarily a mixture of inputs from all the cone receptors, however, as a group, the color sensitivity of cone receptors is biased towards a sensitivity to

yellow, causing yellow to appear brighter than other colors in equal measure. (As a subjective test of this, when looking at a rainbow or drawing of the visible spectrum, observe the relative brightness of yellow and dimness of blue-indigo).1

As the great 20th century American painter Philip Guston said: “What is paint after all? Colored dirt.” On its face, this comment affirms what any Medieval painter would have known intuitively about color, that its production is a predominantly material practice. In the mind of a painter such as Guston, the practice and perception of creative work exists within some mixture of colored dirt, of culture, of psychology, of the eye, and of the brain.

As demonstrated by Philip Ball in Bright Earth, the history of color is also the history of chemistry, at least until the 15th century or so. Beginning with organic pigments and the alum (a critical binder for textile dying) mines of 3rd millennia B.C., the history of art may be described through a limited and familiar cast of characters: white lead, red lead, cinnabar, vermillion (cinnabar’s synthetic replacement) and so on. In specific historical moments, such as the Late-Renaissance period in Venice, the history of art and the history of global trade become merged. The lively color compositions of the Venetian painter Titian, for example, were as much a product of access to colorful Asian pigments as they were a product of an aesthetic position.2

In parallel to the histories of specific pigments, Ball and the art historian John Gage describe the shifting role of painting as an occupation, and that occupation’s ever-changing relationship to color. In the middle ages, painters were deeply engaged in an alchemical practice that is best understood as a merger between natural philosophy (proto-science) and mysticism. This was the source of their colors, and more so than creativity or compositional talent, the techniques of formulating and applying color were the essential skills of medieval painting. Over the course of the middle ages, painting grew more professionalized and more secular. Religious patrons, formulaic

1 _{Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour. Pimlico, 2013.}

2 _{Gage, John. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Thames}

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craft painting, and the shadowy practice of alchemy gave way to secular patrons, a broadening of technique and subject matter, and the beginnings of chemical manufacturing. By the time of Giotto in the 14th century, well-off painters had access to a dozen or so dependable pigments, and possessed the know-how (specific to each pigment) necessary to transform raw material into paint.3

A shift in artistic principles and priorities, away from physical, material production of color, is demonstrated by Renaissance architect and painter Leon Battista Alberti’s in On Painting (1435). After a thorough explanation of his main-priority, single-point perspective and the geometric principles needed to construct perspective in painting, Alberti admits, “At this juncture we ought to say something about lights and colours…”4 _{Alberti launches into a discussion of the interaction of light, color, and}

perception, demonstrating a shockingly precise, intuitive understanding of color, centuries before Newton would codify the scientific understanding of additive and subtractive color mixing. Alberti describes a systematic understanding of color which retains classical associations between color and elements (“fire-colour, which they call red… the colour of air which is said to be blue-grey…”), but also references early attempts to produce an abstract color system. “They set white and black as the two extremes, and another half-way between; then on both sides, between this middle one and each extreme, they put a pair of others, with some uncertainty about their boundaries, though one of each pair is more like the related extreme than the other.” This painful description might be understood as the specifications for a proto-color-wheel. Although, Alberti clearly states that painters require only practical understanding of color and leaves the systemization of color to philosophers. Giorgio Vasari, roughly a century later in On Technique, reinforces this inflection toward practical skill and know-how. Vasari calls for a careful smoothing or blending of colors, to avoid visual disruption or discordance. Like the costuming of the leading

3 _{Thompson, Daniel V., and Bernard Berenson. The Materials and Techniques of Medieval}

Painting. Dover Publications, Inc., 2016.

Fig. 1. The Wilton Diptych Unknown French or English Author. 1395, The National Gallery, London.

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man or woman of Hollywood film tropes, Vasari suggests that color should reinforce the hierarchy of characters in a figurative painting, “…putting the most attractive, the most charming, and the most beautiful colours on the principle figures…” Further, he makes specific color prescriptions, such as the request that draped fabric in nude subjects, “be delicate and similar to the tints of the flesh, either yellowish or reddish, violet or purple, making the depths either green or blue or purple or yellow…” For Vasari, color is another technique to be deployed in service of higher artistic concerns like narrative, figurality, or composition.5

The prioritization of visual effect over the materiality of pure color, in some ways, persists into contemporary painting (although a number of the color field painters of the mid-20th century revive something akin to the medieval interest in pure color). Artists in the 15th and 16th centuries aspired to represent the world faithfully, as experienced by the individual. They identified and named specific painterly effects such as chiaroscuro, light and shade modelled in high contrast, or Da Vinci’s sfumato, literally ‘smokiness’ or dim contrast. With these perceptual techniques in mind and adhering to an overriding Renaissance-era ambition to represent the world accurately, color and material pigment became a means to an end. The discussion of color began to abstract away its material origins, distancing itself from supposedly less-intellectual concerns of pigment formulation and material behavior.6

In the Classical tradition, in which colors and ‘elements’ were conceptually merged, and the Medieval tradition, where color and material were tightly associated, color was always understood in relationship to other, more intuitive systems in the world. The intellectual impulse to systematize color on its own terms, rather than through systems of association and metaphor, arose in the 18th century with Sir Isaac Newton.

Contrary to popular belief, Isaac Newton did not demonstrate that white light splits

5 _{Vasari, Giorgio, and G. Baldwin Brown. Vasari on Technique. Dover Publications, 1960.} 6 _{Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour. Pimlico, 2013.}

into the varied colors of the visual spectrum (which occurred naturally in countless casual situations with light passing through clear glass panes), nor did he describe the phenomenon of rainbow formation in droplets of atmospheric water (this was identified by Descartes in 1637). Rather, Newton’s primary discovery in the arena of light and color was the scientific understanding of the component colors of the visual spectrum, that “light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays…” While Newton intuited that these differences in the refractory angles of colors owed to “vibrations of several bignesses” he was still unable to answer the fundamental question: what is light? That mystery lingered until the 1870s when Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell identified the electromagnetic spectrum, located visible light on a slice of its territory, and proved that the refractory differences between colors were driven by differences in frequency.

Newton’s 1706 Optiks proposed a diagram of color: the color wheel.7 _{Deviating from}

his scientific understanding of a linear visible spectrum, Newton performed a cultural operation, curling the spectrum of visible colors into a closed circle, satisfying his desire for symmetry and mystical numerology (Newton identified seven distinct colors to reflect the seven days of the week and the seven different notes in a musical scale). This system of color and its circular representation, established a long-running tradition of using symmetrical and harmonious geometric systems as maps of color. In contemporary language, we even have a term for this practice and refer to these representations as color models and color spaces (e.g. RGB color-space).

In the early 19th century, German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe attempted to produce a comprehensive theory of color which focused on human perception and psychology as opposed to the pure physics of light and color. This approach was intentionally opposed to the Newtonian position that the phenomena of light and color could be reduced to a set of scientific principles – Goethe aspired

7 _{Newton, Isaac, and Duane H. D. Roller. Optiks: or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions,}

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Fig. 3. Color Wheel with Associated Mental & Spiritual Qualities Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang.

1809, Frankfurt Goethe Museum, Frankfurt. Fig. 2. Color Wheel from Optiks

Newton, Isaac.

to renew the primacy of human experience. The book hardly references scientific research, except in a passing manner, instead focusing on Goethe’s own subjective experience of color perception. This project could be said to be a philosophical or cultural theory of color, as opposed to Newton’s scientific theory of color. Goethe’s writing was compiled in Theory of Colours, and published in 1810.8 _{Even in its time,}

the book was popular among academics and creatives. Beethoven is famously quoted as asking a friend for his copy of Theory of Colours and offering the back-handed compliment, “It is an important work. His last things are insipid.”

At the turn of the 20th century, Albert H. Munsell, an American painter and teacher living in Boston set out to produce a precise color system that represented all the colors available to the human eye.9 _{Originally conceiving of his system as a platonic}

solid, a sphere, the idiosyncrasies of sight and color perception transformed the pure sphere into an uneven, blocky sphere. Working with psychologists and optometrists, each color interval in Munsell’s system represented the smallest change in hue or chroma or value that could still be perceived by the average human viewer. Munsell published his color system as massive volumes of color chips, each page a radial slice of his almost-spherical color space. Though over a century old and largely unchanged since its publishing, the Munsell Color System is still used in a handful of specific applications, such as anthropological field work, the identification of skin colors in forensic work, and the standardization of color in food products like french fries and beer.

Around the same time, in the early 20th century, the pioneers of modern art and design were forming their practices. Several canonical case-studies demonstrate rigorous and varied approaches to color design and practice, most notably, the De Stijl movement, the work of Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus.

The short lived De Stijl movement – translated simply as the style – is of particular

8 _{Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colors. M.I.T. Press, 1970.} 9 _{Munsell, Albert Henry. The Munsell Book of Color. Munsell Color, 2014.}

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relevance to contemporary architects, in its devotion to collaboration across media and discipline, in its rigorous approach to color, and in its ambition to conjure architecture from the picture-plane of architecture’s forgotten research medium, abstract painting.10 _{As an example of this practice, take the colorized interior and}

exterior elevations of Theo van Doesburg’s housing project in Drachten, which are restricted to a baseline of primary colors while introducing subtle shifts in hue to account for the perception of shadow and the differentiated color temperature of interior and exterior light.

The canonical modernist Le Corbusier, renowned for his impact on the following generations of modern designers, deployed color liberally in his work. This owed partially to Corbusier’s dual-practice: painting in the morning and practicing architecture after lunch. From this reciprocal practice, where painting served as

Fig. 4. Superintendent’s Office at Oud-Mathenesse Oud, J.J.P.

1923, Rotterdam, NL

Fig. 5. Heidi Weber Haus Le Corbusier 1967, Zurich, CH

research for architecture and architecture served as research for painting, Corbusier honed a control of color, composition, balance and other so-called ‘painterly’ skills. Yet, even Le Corbusier himself described color as a secondary concern. Color was to be applied, like wallpaper, after resolving the loftier questions of space and form.11

The Bauhaus, known to architects as the canonical model of modern architectural education, was also ground-zero for the development of painterly color theory under the leadership of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. The Bauhaus painters explored color exhaustively, figuring heavily into the foundational courses for both artists and architects.12 _{Itten, a member of the original faculty of the Bauhaus, taught}

color theory and produced The Art of Color, his attempt to theorize color across

11 _{Heer, Jan de. The Architectonic Colour: Polychromy in the Purist Architecture of Le}

Corbusier. 010 Publishers, 2009.

12 _{Poling, Clark V. Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus: Color Theory and Analytical Drawing.}

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Fig. 7. Plate from Interaction of Color Albers, Josef

1963, Yale University Press

Fig. 6. The Chromatic Circle from The Art of Color Itten, Johannes

culture, perception, and aesthetics.13 _{Although written by a painter, the text strikes}

a partially scientific, partially mystical style toward understanding the phenomena of color perception and the ways in which visual artists could deploy leverage these phenomena. Itten, channeling the obsessiveness of a character like Newton, aspired to a harmonic and universal color system in every sense imaginable. Itten was an eccentric character, even in the eyes of the Bauhaus’s radical avant-garde crowd (among other unusual character traits, he was a devout practitioner of Mazdaznan, a neo-Zoroastrian religion – this explains the vegetarianism but possibly not the shaved head and uniform of collarless robes). His time at the Bauhaus was short-lived and his interest in psychoanalysis and mysticism heavily influenced his color system.

Itten’s student Josef Albers continued Itten’s project, finding greater fame and

success both as a painter and as an academic. Albers performed decades of refined color experiments, pursued in the studio and the classroom, originally in the Bauhaus (as both a student and a faculty member) and post-war in a series of American institutions such as Black Mountain College and Yale University. In 1963, Yale University Press published Interaction of Color, a compilation of Albers’s lifetime of color research. Interation of Color stands in contrast to Itten’s work, as Albers’s color experiments are decidedly matter-of-fact and practical, recalling the technique-centric tradition of the Florentine Renaissance painters.

Yet, for all its individual personalities, perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Bauhaus is its curriculum, established as architectural dogma and still duplicated in architecture schools around the world. The iconic Bauhaus curriculum diagram proceeds inward from elemental design studies, to specific material expertise, to building science and construction. Within this curriculum, color occupies an irregular and telling position: both within a foundation course in geometry/color/composition, and as a standalone course in the material sequence which includes wood, glass,

13 _{Itten, Johannes, and Faber Birren. The Elements of Color. John Wiley & Sons, 2003.} 14 _{Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. Yale University Press, 2013.}

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Fig. 8. Bauhaus Curriculum Diagram

Gropius, Walter.

and textiles. This suggests that color possesses a superpositional quality: existing as both a fundamental principle or concern of visual studies and as an autonomous material entity.

Within the art world, oft-dismissed by contemporary architects but critical to the shared history of color, the color works of contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor question the monochrome whiteness of museum

spaces and explore emerging material science, respectively. In the case of Kapoor, an investigation into color-as-material led the artist to acquire artistic rights to Vantablack, an impossibly black pigment produced with vertically aligned carbon nano-tube arrays, V-A-N-T-A. (Like the secret, encoded pigment recipes of medieval alchemists, Kapoor used his fame and wealth to monopolize the use of this material, setting off a cultural debate about artistic principles, money, and access.) Other living artists such as Tauba Auerbach and Cory Arcangel use less conventional media such as digital projection, 3D printing, and the artist book in an attempt to reconsider processes such as additive color-light mixing and subtractive color-material mixing. In the pursuit of a current architectural approach to color, parallel work in fine-art might offer unconventional research methodologies and novel modes of production.15

COLORZOOM seeks to enter into conversation with these historical and extra-disciplinary models, transposing their concerns and rigor into the context of

increasingly digitalized architectural practice. It pursues color-practice and expertise, bringing the concern of color (back?) into relationship with the broader contingencies and disciplinary questions of architectural practice. As John May proposes in the essay “Everything is Already an Image”, the technologies of architectural production are increasingly shifting the discipline from the practice of drawing to

image-making. The projected drawings produced by Revit or Rhino are not true objects of orthographic drawing, but rather, they are ‘pseudorthographic’ images -- simulations

15 _{Graw, Isabelle, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the}

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Fig. 9. VANTA Black Grown on Tinfoil Surrey NanoSystems.

2014.

Fig. 10. Void Pavilion VI Anish Kapoor

of orthographic projection rendered as images.16 _{In the context of this disciplinary}

and technological shift, which necessarily elevates the pixel and image to a status typically reserved for form and line, there emerges the need and opportunity for image-making expertise. And, if a future of architectural images is to have a kind of tectonics, color is may well be their structure.

One degree removed from the question of color in art and architecture are the systems of display which house art and other cultural artifacts, and those display systems’s relationship to color. Brian O’Doherty’s collection of essays Inside the White Cube discusses the predominant architectural and display style in contemporary art: the white cube.17 _{O’Doherty presents the white cube gallery as the crystallization of}

modernist aesthetics, and suggests that the white cube environment has social and economic implications on both viewers and on the work displayed within. In the sterile environment of a gallery stripped of color and context, art objects are elevated to a near-religious status. This temple-like architectural significance transfers to the art objects on display, increasing their economic and cultural value. Like the boutique clothing store with only a handful of dresses on display – treat an object reverently and it may command a great price.

Implicitly referencing O’Doherty, Olafur Eliasson discusses the white cube environment of galleries and museums in his 2006 essay, Some Ideas About Color.18 _Eliasson

questions the monochrome whiteness of museum spaces and wonders what might be the implications of gallery and museum institutions adopting yellow, for example, as the default color scheme for art display. Eliasson’s all-yellow gallery is an interesting but naive suggestion, as yellow and white are simply and objectively different. For the same reason the magazine ARTFORUM adopted a square print format (in order not to privilege vertical or horizontal images), the whiteness of the art gallery produces

16 _{May, John. “Everything Is Already an Image.” Log 40, 2017.}

17 _{O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Univ. of Calif.}

Press.

18 _{Elíasson Ólafur, et al. Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory. Arcadia University Art Gallery,}

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Fig. 11. Inside the White Cube Installation Turner, Daniel

2012, White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK

color neutrality. At least in terms of hue and chroma, a white gallery is impartial toward the works within. A fully black gallery space, as is common for the display of video and projection artworks, inverts the conventional display, but is similarly color-neutral.

Of course, in the history of museum display, white walls did not always dominate. In the salon-style installations common through the 19th century, generous frames allowed for works to hang in tightly packed groupings. If one thinks of modern or contemporary painting, typically displayed without a frame, the organization of the gallery space and the distance between paintings must perform the work of the frame, visually insulating the works from one another. Visit the Medieval or Renaissance collections of any general art museum and you will likely find colored walls behind those gold-gilded frames – deep, murky blues and soft, burnt reds.

Color is further problematized by the predominant color production and display system of our day, the computer. Digital color space is a dizzying soup of acronyms and technological jargon. Digital color space is infinitely divisible, mathematically capable of specifying colors beyond the brackets of human perception. And digital color space is limited by the technologies of display, both on screen and in print, which are designed with only a partial consideration of the human eye.

Digital color is most often produced through the mixing of red, green, and blue light in individual pixels of digital displays. In material terms, this is achieved through the use of color emitting materials called phosphors. When a phosphor is struck by an electron beam, it radiates colored light corresponding to its specific chemistry, and a sufficiently dense grid of phosphors can reproduce a recognizable image. Anticipating this display system, images stored in digital file formats are broken down into a grid and every grid square or pixel assigned a single color value – the denser the divisions of the grid, the greater the detail and fidelity of the image.

While the digital display of images can be quite precise and newer display technologies can approach true color representation, consumer-grade products frequently cut corners in terms of color representation. The combination of red, green, and blue phosphor signals is limited and unable to represent the full spectrum of color available to the human eye. Phosphors capable of producing ultra-saturated colors, which would be necessary to produce all visible colors, are cost prohibitive to manufacture. This limited range of colors, bracketed by the technology of display, is referred to as the color gamut, and digital displays deal with colors outside their range or gamut by swapping them out for the closest possible replacement color within the color gamut.

As with the increasing complexity of color display, systems for describing color have been forced to grow more complex as scientific understanding of color deepens. Abandoning the neat symmetry of the Newton’s wheel for more technical and esoteric classification systems, contemporary color systems capture a highly complex

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de L’éclairage or International Commission on Illumination, developed the first CIE chromaticity curve in 1931. Typically represented as a blobby triangle on a Cartesian graph, the CIE curve, like Munsell’s color space, is actually a series of slices or sections taken from a three-dimensional color space representing every color within the range of human sight. Over the generations, CIE has persisted in influencing industry by incrementally refining its color research, currently with the 1976 CIELAB color space and the 2002 CIECAM02 color appearance model.19

Even the referential relationship between language and color, in a sense the oldest color representation system, has slowly evaporated since the early 20th century. Munsell preferred an orderly numbering structure for the Munsell Color System Language, and the majority of modern color systems have followed suit. In an era of digital interfaces that close the distance between the user perception and color feedback on-screen, language is removed altogether. In the computer, one does not have to name or specify a color in order to use it. Simply click on a color swatch, adjust a few sliders, sample a color from a found image, and so on.

In an era of digital interfaces that close the distance between user perception and image feedback on-screen, traditional mediators like drawing and language are often removed altogether. Despite this, where the corporate world dovetails with color, the naming of synthetic colors often maintains the centuries old tradition of referencing colored materials found in the natural world. Take the American PANTONE system, an industry standard color matching system often used in the manufacture of plastic, textiles, or industrial paint.e RBG color 200, 80, 50 is also known as Eurotints 660, Butterfly 1111, Dulux Colour Specifier’s FIERY GLOW, NCS 0585-Y70R, Frazee paint Colorlife’s JUBILEE, Wattyl Colour Designer’s BALLISTIC, California Paints Perfect Palette’s BURNING TOMATO, Valspar Color System’s ARIZONA SUNSET, and ACE Clark and Kensington’s BE SPONTANEOUS. One may have gathered that this is a reddish-orange – a specific, vibrant orange, that will fill your guest bathroom with the spontaneous energy of a burning tomato!

For architects, the now-mythological Corbusian practice of painting at dawn has been replaced by the practice of coding at midnight. Floating miles from the shores of painter Philip Guston’s methodical colored dirt (paint), the contemporary atmosphere of color is fleeting and rapid, like phosphors firing in a digital display. Now more than ever, color saturates daily life and the technologies of image-making infiltrate architectural practice. And architects face a renewed obligation: to both untangle and contribute to the riddle of architectural color.

Fig. 12. Color Standards for Frozen French Fried Potatoes Munsell Lab.

C O L O R D E F I N E D B Y A

F I E L D O F P O I N T S

These design experiments explore the production of color contrast and gradients using a field of points. Reduced to the fundamental geometry of an exaggerated point or spherical voxel, color arises not from form or lighting conditions, but as an index of position and proximity to other points. With the addition of movement, in the form of simulated gravity, color becomes fluid, refreshing and adapting with each passing frame. On a technical level, the physics and coloration are re-calculated and re-rendered, in that order, frame by frame. As the objects in the frame come to rest, coloration becomes fixed as well. In the video pieces which feature colorized ground planes, sometimes the ground is beholden to the spatio-localized color rules, shifting as the many positions of the composition shift. In other instances, the ground plane is free and independent of the

C O L O R S P E C I F I C T O

T H E M A T E R I A L O F A

P L A C E

This series of design experiments take seriously the history of Medieval painting and the material production of color and pigment. After learning the fundamentals of pigment formulation, becoming familiar with various organic and synthetic binders, and so on, a series of found materials were collected from my local environment with the intention

of being formulated into custom pigments and colors.

Together, the 12 colors construct a chromatic index of an individual domestic space. Each material was processed, mixed with acrylic binder, and painted onto test cards. The painted test cards were subsequently scanned, averaged into a single color, and given an existing name from industry which is associated that particular color. Leftover pigment was mixed with PVA binder, the binder found in white glue and industrial house paints, and formed into small objects. Following the formulation of material pigments, these colors were organized to produce an idiosyncratic model of color specific to an individual space and identity. Deploying historical color model tropes such as the projection of color onto platonic geometry, the pure form of the color wheel, and harmonic numerology, these models formalize the specific color palette, rendering it faux-universal. Developed as scale-agnostic physical models, the objects were fabricated using a plaster 3D printing technique which deposits pigment and binder at the same time, producing both form and coloration simultaneously. In contrast to this doubly additive process, the prints are subjected to moisture after printing, causing the subtle, subtractive ruin of the material and its

SYSTEM SYSTEM NAME NAME 23, 26, 81, 0 CMYK f5dea1 HEX

SYSTEM SYSTEM NAME NAME 20, 23, 24 LAB 732 XGC PANTONE Gold Earth PANTONE

Veg Out Clark+Kensington Hungover Red SELF-NAMED SYSTEM NAME SYSTEM NAME

Norwich Brown BENJAMIN MOORE

N 0.6/0 MUNSELL COLOR SYSTEM

All White FARROW + BALL

SYSTEM NAME

SYSTEM NAME

C O L O R M O D I F I E D B Y

T H E A C T O F N A M I N G

Contemporary color, in its abstraction and divorce from the specificity of place and material, finds itself subject to the motives of paint corporations, decorators, and marketing firms. PANTONE, for example, uses two color naming systems in parallel, a precise numerical system used in practice by designers, and a clever set of color

names useful in seducing consumers.

Rose Quartz or Living Coral, PANTONE’s Color of the Year selections from 2016 and 2019, are far more seductive to consumers than their respective PANTONE codes: Pantone 13-1520 or Pantone 16-1546. This vast sea of language and naming operates like an arcane, glitched-out system of representation, drawing as much from science as

from clever marketing departments, and bordering on the absurd.

This series of images and animations are constructed entirely from pure colors and the names assigned to those colors by various corporations, stealthily projecting gender,

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255, 255, 255

sRGB #FFFFFF

HIGH REFLECTIVE WHITE

Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap SW 7757

HIGH REFLECTIVE

WHITE

83

BIT OF SUGAR

Behr Fandeck PR-W14

MOON LILY

Dulux Colour Specifier P41-B3

HIGH REFLECTIVE

WHITE

85

LOYALIST

Diamond Vogel Showcase Portfolio 7228

SILVER SCREEN Eurotints 1008 2919P

HIGH REFLECTIVE

WHITE

MOON LILY

SILVER SCREEN

87

TAUPE

Solver Paints Colour Selector 2581

BROOK TROUT ACE Illuminations 175-F

HIGH REFLECTIVE

WHITE

MOON LILY

89

EXECUTIVE

Dulux Colour Guide 70RR 64/034

NEBULOUS

Dulux Colour Specifier P06-B2

HIGH REFLECTIVE

WHITE

MOON LILY

91

NECCO

Eurotints 1008 2857P

BEYOND BEIGE Taubmans Cards 26DA-3

HIGH REFLECTIVE

WHITE

MOON LILY

93

DEMETRIO

Diamond Vogel Showcase Portfolio 8689

C O L O R A S A N I N D E X

O F A S S E M B L Y O R

C O N S T R U C T I O N

M E T H O D O L O G Y

The following experiments use the surface application of color to mark and index otherwise invisible methods of assembly and connection. Here, the organization and logic of construction are literally marked and diagrammed in space. Chromatic continuity may be read as structural continuity. The disruption of a colorized vector may read as that element’s secondary position in an assembly, or its secondary position in

C O L O R D E F I N E D

R E L A T I V E T O A

D I R E C T I O N A L V E C T O R

I N S P A C E

The following design exercises deploy color as an index of surface directionality, as measured relative to a fixed vector in space. In the animated experiments, where forms are put into motion or acted upon by gravity, the coloration is live, being recalculated

C O L O R W H I C H E X I S T S

O N L Y I N T H E M I N D

This set of design experiments focus on the perceptual phenomenon associated with color, exploring colors which arise only in the mind. Through a series of animations which vary in tempo, pairs of individual colors are toggled quickly back-and-forth, producing the sensation of additive color mixing for the viewer. The works make use of additive color mixing and digitally projected or displayed light, with the effect varying not only from view to viewer, but from display apparatus to display apparatus. As each animation ramps up in speed, the perception of color mixing grows more convincing and the hybrid color, which exists only in the mind of the viewer, grows stronger (for example, the toggling between red and blue produces the

C O L O R , A S

P E R C E I V E D B Y

A N O N - H U M A N

O R A T E C H N I C A L

A P P A R A T U S

The following series of photographic images document chromatic flicker animations not as they are perceived by the human eye, but as they are perceived by the camera and its associated image processing algorithms. The images reveal the perceptual biases of the camera, analogical to the quirks and slippages of human vision, as well

C O L O R I N M O T I O N O R

V I E W E D I N M O T I O N

This set of color experiments explore color in relationship to perspective, movement, and a perceived space. The first animation in the stack, constructed as a scrolling, moving-image work, might be perceived as spatial or graphic, perceptually toggling between flatness and depth depending on the color relationships within the frame and the subjectivity of the individual viewer. In technical terms, each piece is developed in a digital modeling environment, and filmed as a digital tracking-shot or a fixed, parallel projection view of moving elements.

I M A G E C I T A T I O N S

Fig. 2. Newton, Isacc. “Color Wheel from From Book I, Part II, Proposition VI, Problem 2.” Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, 1704.

Fig. 3. Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. “Farbenkreis Zur Symbolisierung Des

Menschlichen Geistes- Und Seelenlebens.” Seminar for Germanistik, Meiji University, 2005, Frankfurt Goethe Museum, www.isc.meiji.ac.jp/~mmandel/recherche/goethe_ farbenkreis.html.

Fig. 4. Superintendent’s Office at Oud-Mathenesse by J.J.P. Oud. 17 Aug. 2019. Fig. 5. Baechler, Marcel. Center Le Corbusier vs. Heidi Weber Museum Zurich. Zurich, CH, 30 May 2015.

Fig. 6. Itten, Johannes. “The Chromatic Circle from The Art of Color.” Images and Models of Thought, 7 May 2020, www.researchgate.net/figure/Johannes-Itten-The-chromatic-circle-some-exercises-on-the-contrast-of-pure-colors_fig2_321140218. Fig. 7. Albers, Josef. “Plate from Interaction of Color.” Interaction of Color, Yale University Press, 1963.

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Fig. 8. Gropius, Walter. “Bauhaus Curriculum Diagram.” Practice of Change, 2018, www.practiceofchange.org/pub/ch3/release/1.

Fig. 9. Surrey NanoSystems. “VANTA Black Grown on Tinfoil.” 2014.

Fig. 10. Kapoor, Anish. “Void Pavilion VI.” Anish Kapoor, 2018, Beppu Park, Noguchibaru, JP, anishkapoor.com/6296/void-pavilion-v.

Fig. 11. Turner, Daniel. “Inside the White Cube Installation.” 2012, White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK, https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/daniel_ turner_bermondsey_2012

Fig. 12. Munsell Lab. “Munsell USDA Frozen French Fry Standard.” PANTONE, 2020, www.pantone.com/products/munsell/munsell-usda-frozen-french-fry-standard.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. Yale University Press, 1963. Alberti, Leon Battista, et al. On Painting. Penguin, 2005.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of California Press, 2011.

Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour. Pimlico, 2013.

Elíasson Ólafur, et al. Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory. Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2006.

Finlay, Victoria, et al. An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour: The Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection. Atelier Éditions, 2018.

Flusser, Vilém, et al. Into the Universe of Technical Images. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Gage, John. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Graw, Isabelle, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition. Sternberg Press, 2016.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and Charles Lock Eastlake. Theory of Colors. M.I.T. Press, 1970.

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Guilbaut, Serge. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945-1964. The MIT Press, 1995.

Heer, Jan de. The Architectonic Colour: Polychromy in the Purist Architecture of Le Corbusier. 010 Publishers, 2009.

Itten, Johannes, and Faber Birren. The Elements of Color. John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Keller, Sean. “Playing the Field: Computational Architecture and Abstract Painting.” ARTFORUM, 2011.

May, John. “Everything Is Already an Image.” Log 40, 2017.

Munsell, Albert Henry. The Munsell Book of Color. Munsell Color, 2014.

Newton, Isaac, and Duane H. D. Roller. Optiks: or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Dover, 1979.

O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Univ. of Calif. Press.

Olsson, Gertrud. The Visible and the Invisible: Color Contrast Phenomena in Space. Axl Books, 2009.

Poling, Clark V. Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus: Color Theory and Analytical Drawing. Rizzoli, 1987.

Proctor, Jacob, et al. Morgan Fisher: Conversations. Aspen Art Press, 2014. Thompson, Daniel V., and Bernard Berenson. The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. Dover Publications, Inc., 2016.

Troy, Nancy J. The De Stijl Environment. MIT Press, 1986.

Vasari, Giorgio, and G. Baldwin Brown. Vasari on Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Scupltors and Architects. Dover Publications, 1960.