Colour for Architecture Today

Abstract: The Art of Design Documentary Episode 1 Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience and feelings of self. Most of his work strives to make a great impact relating his work to the society.

One of his work, “Room for all colours” exploring the way that colour is ‘produced’ by the manipulation of visual phenomena within an environment. He uses a projection screen to divide a room from floor to ceiling by litting a matrix of red, green and blue filter foils using a grid of white lights mounted to a wall. By adjusting the intensity of the light behind the filters and diffusing it through the projection screen, the work can produce any colour, presenting visitors with one homogeneous hue.

Through this experiment, visitors are reminded not only our experience of colour is closely related to our experience of light, but also that it is influenced by cultural habit and physical environment. I feel that his idea was brilliant on how many people trying to search for other colours and making them to appreciate colour.

‘Over the years, in making art, I have constantly explored issues dealing with space, time, light, and society. I am particularly interested in how the light of a space determines how we see that space and similarly, in how light and colour are actually phenomena within us, within our own eyes.’

Olafur Eliasson, 2018

The Gray Cloth © Paul Scheerbart’s Novel on Glass Architecture 1914

This novel is an adventurous read about a journey of a Swiss architect, Edgar Krug travel around the world with his wife, constructing variety of coloured-glass buildings. Interesting fact that is the architect was afraid of his architecture is challenged by the colourfulness of women’s clothing, he required that his wife to be dressed up in all grey clothing. This unusual request brings him fame for his international building campaign.

Interested in wildly varied coloured-glass buildings to be incorporated in design proposal, this book shows the methods on discovering new knowledge and sorting them. Author surveys on Scheerbart’s career and role in German modern-day setting, as well as his architectural social philosophies. Discovering the integration of spiritual and romantic learnings in the modern world with the use of glass architecture. Scheerbart sketches everything he see when travelling different places. In addition to discussing the novel’s reception and its rediscovery by contemporary architects and critics, Stuart shows fiction to be a resource for the study of architecture and places The Gray Cloth in the context of German expressionism.

This novel is an eye-opening discovery of the alternative ways during that period of time where phones did not exist in recording what we see. The way of sketching and water colour is effective to express the feeling of the real situation. Colours are interpreted as a medium to deliver messages to others. People are able to imagine even they are not there to experience it.