This Book Examines The Enduring Power Of Color In Architecture

Chromatic Architecture: The Craft of Colour in Design by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Kate Mazade
RIBA Books/Routledge, $60
208 pages, 120 color images

“Color comes in waves of popularity, and we’re re-entering an era when it will be used seriously,” proclaims Kate Mazade, cowriter of this volume in which she and coauthor Adam Nathaniel Furman detail 34 vivid structures around the globe—homes, headquarters, halls, and temples, dating from the 1300s to today—that are both daring and enduring (many still stand today).

The journey kicks off with the cover project, the 1924 office of Hoechst, a dye manufacturer in Frankfurt, Germany, where Peter Behrens installed jewel-toned bricks in the atrium, employing his client’s wares right in the architecture, branding before branding was a thing. Even older and more vibrant is the 1885 facade of the Casa Vicens house in Barcelona, Spain, by Antoni Gaudí, its checkerboard of orange-and-yellow floral tiles set into a sort of turquoise and vermillion gingham, proving that integrally colored materials can survive a hundred years of weather. More recent projects include the 2001 towering Maishima Incineration Plant in Osaka, Japan, that Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser tattooed with red arteries and the 2005 Reversible Destiny Lofts apartment complex in the Tokyo suburbs which artist Shusaku Arakawa and poet Madeline Gins painted 14 riotous shades (at least one nauseated resident moved out).

It’s all evidence, the authors note, that color can trigger emotion, especially when used experimentally. And that it can lend humanity, identity—even transcendence.

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