Colour Imago: Paradigms of Colour

Hans Hollein, Retti Candle Shop, Vienna, Austria, 1966

CÖLOR I MAG O Paradigms of Colour

By Giacomo Pala In architecture, the question of colour has almost al way s been conceived and interpreted through dualisms. Colour often is the misfit in ideological oppositions: abstraction vs. figuration, appearance vs. reality, content vs. aesthetic, primary vs. secondary qualities of a space. Furthermore, even though these oppositions are inscribed in precise epistemological patterns and

ideological backgrounds, they also refer to a similar metaphysical frame: the distinction of content from appearance, and form from aesthetics; as if these were diametrically opposed realities. This is probably because “colour” is difficult to situate both within the act of designing, and in the formal discourse of architecture: in both of these practices, “materials” and “composition” tend to prevail

as defined and categorized cultural values.

Moreover, although architecture has often been interpreted as a language, there has not been any serious attempt of describing colour as a linguistic element. After all, is colour a symbol? A referent? A trace? What is it?1

property of the object and, in turn, is mandator y in the consideration of “perception," of the way in which appearances imbue reality with meaning, in this case, the reality of architecture. In other words, as Robin Evans once wrote: “appearance must be the measure of truth, at least temporarily. […] Appearance is never the whole truth, but it is true to itself ”. 2

Almost any of the semiotic analyses of architectural language, by reducing architecture to diagrammatic relationships of parts and symbols, shows its limitations in solving this conundrum. The sense of this essay is to pose a different theoretical hypothesis about colour, by analyzing a series of specific cases. The thesis of this text is that colour cannot be interpreted as a merel y superfluous and potential l y unnecessary aspect of a space/building, but rather that it has to be considered as a true

To do so, the work of three Austrian masters of architecture will be analyzed — Adolf Loos, Josef Frank and Hans Hollein — as examples of three different paradigmatic ways of thinking about the question of colour, appearance and, ultimately, forms of producing knowledge through architecture.

Adolf Loos, Löwenbach House, 1913

Please note that, as observed by Thierry de Duve, “The arbitrariness of the names of colours is the favourite example of linguists who want to show the primacy of language (language) over speech (parole)”. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.135 1

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Robin Evans, Mies van der Rohe’s Paradoxical Symmetries, in AA Files, No 19 (Spring 1990), p.60

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Adolf Loos: Material.

what is often derided as just “image”. In Loos’ work we undeniably see an opposition between the realm of colours, and that of values: the use of materials with “inherent colour," rather than applied colours, is invariably used to signal the elimination of the image in favour of a supposedly “superior” abstract content.

If there was one architect who seems to have believed in the strict separation of content from appearance, then it would surely be Ad o l f L o o s . D e s p i t e s om e o f t h e contradictions patently noticeable in his work, the author of “Ornament and Crime” can be taken as the paradigmatic example of the modernist view on the use of colour in architecture. In fact, where XIXth century eclecticism had briefly exalted the use of colours, Adolf Loos and his comrades declared any use of colour that loudly announces itself in a space as immoral “ornamentation”. To Loos’ eyes, the use of any “banal” colour was unnecessary, and superficial.

White, granite, marbles and wood are, to Loos’s eyes, the representation of dignity and morality, while applied colours are mere decoration and, of course, crime; so much so that we must interpret such a view on colour as traditionalist. Indeed, it is possible to read the modernist attempt at producing a tabula rasa of values as the radical negation (and, as such, belief ) of the idea of colour as nothing more than the narrow-minded metaphor of set cultural meanings: blue is calm, gold is rich, red is passion. In other words, by attempting to get rid of colours, the functionalists demonstrate a very naïve and s u p e r fi c i a l u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f t h i s architectural quality. For them, colour has no more importance than the belief in destiny or any other superstition3 . Colour, for Loos and his acolytes, is then an irrational cultural element that we should use very carefully, if not get rid of as soon as we can, once and for all.

Still, in Loos we see something more refined than the simple disbelief in a joyful and lively use of colour. What we see is a traditional system of values and its elaborated moral characteristics. In Loos’ architecture, the only colours permitted, other than white, are the inherent textural characteristics of the materials deployed in his projects (these in turn are paradoxically both overly textured and used to extreme excess in the interiors of his houses). Thus, if colour is the property of the material, and the form of a building is the result of the logics of construction, then the quality of colour is circumscribed by the formal properties of the building. It is in this moral distinction between form (as the embodiment of content) and colour (as a visual trick) where lies the main ideological background behind any of the debates among the apostles of the primacy of content over appearance, and the creators of

Josef Frank: Colour Opposed to Adolf Loos we find Josef Frank: the Austrian architect whose professional career flourished in Sweden. Fifteen years younger than Loos, Frank is — par excellence — the modernist architect who enjoys deploying colours, rich materials, fantasy

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Actually, it is interesting to report Charles Holland’s observation about Loos’ use of colour: “Sometimes it [colour] is the —only aspect of the room that is conventional or familiar. It is a temporary source of comfort then, the best that Loos felt he could offer. Ultimately, Loos' own codification of colour — yellow = feminine, black and red = masculine, for example — are less interesting than the manner in which he applies it” in Charles Holland, “In Colour”, in Saturated Space, https://issuu.com/saturatedspace/docs/ in_colour_charles_holland (10/13/2017)

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Josef Frank, Design for a Family House, 1940

“Every human being needs a certain amount of sentiment in order to feel comfortable; people are deprived of this when they are forced to impose moral demands on everything […] Away with universal styles, away with the whole complex of ideas that has gained popularity under the name of functionalism! I propose replacing this system of architecture with a new one. […] for the time being, I will call it “accidentalism” to make it clear that we should be creating an environment that appears to have arisen by accident.” 6

and symbolism. He defines his method as “accidentalism”: “A sitting room in which one can live and think freely is neither beautiful, nor harmonious, nor photogenic. It is the result of a series of random accidents; it is never completed and it has sufficient scope to include whatever may be needed to satisfy its owner ’s shifting requirements.” 4

As we can easily see, Frank takes a stand against the “demiurgic” personality of the functionalist architects. As Loos made fun of some of his colleagues, writing about an architect angry at his client because of his poor taste in choosing his slippers (once again, we see Loos’ contradictory position at play), so Frank wants to avoid any imposition to his clients, defining his method as follow5:

Even though this text might seem to anticipate “participatory design," if we read the extract closely, we cannot help but notice that the idea of the “accident” is here inscribed in a design methodology, it is not an ideological “bottom up” strategy; spaces have to look as if they were designed by accident, not actually have been grown as an accumulation of accidents. Somehow, what

Josef Frank, “Accidentalism” (1958), in Mikael Beerquist, Olof Michélsen (edited by), Josef Frank, Accidentalism, (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), p.20 4

See: Adolf Loos, "The Poor Little Rich Man" (1900), in August Sarnitz, Adolf Loos 1870-1933, (Cologne: Taschen, 2006), pp.18-21 5

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Josef Frank, “Accidentalism” (1958), in Mikael Beerquist, Olof Michélsen (2006), p.24

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“In a child's life, colour is the pure expression of the child's pure receptivity, in so far as it is directed at the world. It contains an implicit instruction to a life of the spirit which is no more dependent on accidental circumstances for its creativity than colour, for all its receptivity, is capable of communication about the existence of dead, causal reality7.”

Frank acknowledges is the need of metaphors (“sentiment to feel comfortable”) in modern architecture, so much so that he seems to announce the contemporary understanding of language as partly based on metaphors. Consequently, we can look at the attempt of defining such a metaphor in Frank’s work and, more particularly, in his drawings and watercolours. First of all, Frank – who was a gifted interior designer and painter — represents all of his projects with delightful sketch perspectives. The houses are depicted in pastel colours and inserted in natural settings. His city plans are to modernist urbanism what Paul Klee’s paintings are to neoplasticism: festive representations of variety through an assemblage of colourful objects. His tapestry is a kind of colourful representation of nature mixed with abstract gestures. What we see in Frank’s use of colours is such a lively expression of joy and ease, that it became impossible for him to take part in the archi-linguistic tabula rasa of values attempted by Loos, his friends, and the functionalists. On the contrary, Frank’s drawings and projects are designators of meaning that operate entirely through those traditions, symbols and sentiments, that his erstwhile contemporaries were attempting to banish.

Frank’s poetic is somewhat similar: the attempt of communicating the casual reality of domesticity. Yet, in this communicative and easygoing way of using colour, we still see that the use of “natural," calmer colours tends to prevail over the bright, industrial ones, that are — as noticed by Jean Baudrillard – the most typical of mass and popular culture. In a sense, Frank’s use of colour still represents a kind of “snobism” against the new “pop” world, and so, his approach thus reveals itself to be very much an echo of tradition. An approach that, according once again to Baudrillard, is well represented by the “order” of the pastels: colours that “aspire to be living colours but are in fact merely signs for them, complete with a dash of moralism.8”

Hans Hollein: Materials and Colours.

Finally, if Loos represents the position against the use of colours and Frank its dialectical opposite, would it be possible to find a synthesis between the two? Or even better, a coexisting tension between these two options? In other words, does a reconciliatory position exist in which content, image, abstraction and symbolism become one?

Furthermore, his use of colour can be compared to the way a child (who is by nature keen to have accidental experiences) relates to it. That is to say, according to Walter Benjamin, that, as in a child’s drawing, Frank’s use of colour is an ingenuous poetic.

Walter Benjamin, “A Child's View of Color”, in Walter Benjamin (Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings), Selected Writings, Volume 1 1913-1926, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p.51 (emphasis added) 7

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Jean Baudrillard (translated by James Benedict), the System of Objects, (New York City: Verso Books, 1996), p.33

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To retroactively discover such a thesis, we can look to the work of a third Austrian architect, Hans Hollein, from a renewed perspective. Hollein’s use of colours and materials is not remotely as clear and didactic as Loos’, or even Frank’s. Rather, Hollein allows himself to use any kind of physical substance: from granite to paint, from plastic to gold, and everything in between. His projects are full of quotations and contradictions that are as paradoxical as they are explicit. In this sense, it is more difficult to unambiguously comprehend Hollein’s poetic of colours and materials but, precisely for this reason, it is a more interesting challenge.

In other words, the use of new technologies and the development of new aesthetics, forces us to rethink the idea of colour in late-modernity, transforming colours into names abstractly encoded in mass produced materials. Colour, then, acquires a material “depth”: a sort of locality for which the colour is as important as the material itself.

And it is this new dimension of colour that appears so clearly in Hollein’s work. Indeed, while seeking to burn away “high” modernist values, Hollein used colours and materials as expressive elements of his language in the act of designing an architecture which is at the same time popular and elitist.

Examples of this kind of material usage by Hollein can be found in the city center of Vienna, more precisely in Kohlmarkt and Graben, near Stephanplatz: the Schullin jewelry (1974) and the Retti Candle shop (1966)10. Let’s start with the Retti Candle shop. First, by looking at the drawing made on this shop’s façade, we see that the entrance is in the shape of a cartoonish ionic column (some would say “phallus”11) that is cut in its metallic façade: an ironic void.

Furthermore, the use of materials is strikingly intriguing. The façade is made entirely of flat and curved aluminum sheets, resulting in a kind of flickering jewelry box: the result is an ever-surprising mix of futurism, pop and historic quotations. Even more interesting in terms of material usage, is the first shop for Schullin Jewelry (1974) in Graben. For this project, Hollein designs a monolithic façade of granite that is

To start, it is opportune to reflect upon the changes that have allowed for the use of new materials during the second half of the last century in architecture and design. The serially produced objects that began to enter everyone’s homes in the fifties, were either painted with bright colours, or were made in shiny plastics. So much so, that the kind of emancipation they represented could be associated very precisely with specific colour palettes that were prevalent in each of the following decades. The table, the refrigerator, the phone, the car — any object — changed its colour (as well as its shape) over the decades, as did architecture. From this point of view, we can use Roland Barthes’ idea that the new plastics were nothing more than “concepts of colours”: “of yellow, red and green, it [plastic] keeps only the aggressive quality, and uses them as mere names 9”.

Roland Barthes (translated by Annette Lavers), “Plastic”, in Mythologies (1957), (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p.99 9

For whom might know the city of Vienna, the omission of the Tabak-Trafik’s façade (1991) and the second Shullin’s Jewelry (1982) are voluntary because in these projects Hollein focuses more on figurative elements: the “leave” for the Tabak’s façade and an ax for the Jewelry.

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For instance, this is what Terry Farrell has recently written about the project: “It [the Retti candle shop] relies heavily on more knowingly-shaped graphic effects, with an aluminium frontage resembling a face, a phallic entrance door, and a mirrored interior”” in Terry Farrell, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Revisiting Postmodernism, (London: RIBA Publishing, 2017) p.25

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Hans Hollein, Isometric Drawing for the Kantine Siemens AG in München, 1970

cracked and opened by a free-form geometry which cuts the entrance with a layering of bronze curves and tubes. The shop window stands on fake grass, while the interior is made of bronze, laminate, marble and sprayed plastics. Here everything is glittering, even though materials are both precious and mundane. In this project, we can easily see, then, the attempt to reconcile the positions epitomized by Loos and Frank, as well as Hollein’s elitism: high and low taste become one through the contradictory

use of geometry, materials, technologies, shapes, figures, colours and decoration.

Similarly, in his two projects for “Siemens AG”, we find a strategy of using materials and colours for the production of ironic statements. In the first one (the “Carl FriedrichV. Siemens Stiftung”), there are several guest rooms (Gästespeiseräume), each painted or coated differently. One is made of orange plastic, one is painted in blue and white stripes, one is in wood, one is an elegant space for dinners coated in

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Hans Hollein, sketch for the Kantine Siemens AG in MĂźnchen, 1970

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Marble. In this project, any kind of material is considered as a mean to produce content.

Even more clearly, such a quality emerges in the drawings of the second building developed for the same company, though unfortunately never built. This project, as part of a development planned for the “Siemens” group in Munich, was to host offices, semi-private spaces, assembly rooms and desk spaces. Formally speaking, Hollein plays with a language consisting in the assemblage of objects in a field. As perfectly shown by the axonometric drawing, this project was indeed meant as a neutral space populated by different objects and subspaces, based on geometrical schemes. This way of designing was quite common at the time (it would be enough to mention Ettore Sottsass’ projects), but this project, due to its didactic qualities, can help illustrate the use of colours and materials mentioned before.

materials, symbolisms and colours is not, then, a derivative way of metaphorically representing the cultural reality that stands in front of the designer. Hollein seems to tell us that to use colours and joyful materials does not mean to be populist by mimicking and mocking the “popular”. It is quite the opposite: in Hollein’s architecture the use of quotations and joyful textures is a way to give meaning to the world; to create the world and its reality: if a space is a travel agency, then all of its interiors have to resonate in our imagination as exotic elements. In other words, Hollein teaches us that architecture is an active contributor in the construction of our cultural imaginary, it is not a blank discipline that cannot do anything else but metaphorically embody cultural values.

If we acknowledge the existence of popular culture (with its colours, symbolisms and fi g u r a t i v e q u a l i t i e s ) i t i s b e c a u s e architectures like Hollein’s have taken part in its creation: architecture is not the simple embodiment of the Zeitgeist; it takes part in the construction of our cultural imaginary by actively producing images and shapes13.

And his architecture does that by showing a kind of complex figurative content that is deep, yet accessible; literate, yet devoid of awkward slogans. Hollein’s architecture is intelligent and clever, but not boring: everything is architecture, but architecture is not all.

We can compare this axonometric drawing (which depicts the concluding solution for the project) with an early sketch of the interior space 12. What we see is an empty space in which visitors stumble upon different colourful objects. These are represented by Hollein as abstract painted shapes, yet they are intended as material and very real. The representation of this project shows how, in Hollein’s work (at least if analyzed from the point of view of its materials and colours), the use of colours is not a “simulacra” of higher values, but is rather a way of creating content.

Finally, thanks to this deployment of colours as tools for merging high and low, the intellectual and the sensual, we can consider Hollein as a great architect, and a paradigmatic example that is still valid today.

Hollein’s work shows us how the use of colour is not a matter of adding secondary qualities to those of an abstract space, or of creating perceptual illusions. The use of

The project changes an impressive series of times during the design phase, going from compositions made of circles in the plan to compositions of just hexagons and every solution in-between. Moreover, I want to seize the opportunity to thank Lilli Hollein for the kind availability and Mechthild Ebert for her kindness and help in consulting the archives AzW (Architekturzentrum Wien).

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To see images see. http://hollein.com/eng/Architecture/Nations/Austria/Oesterreichisches-Verkehrsbuero

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He is an architect who doesn’t moan about the loss of cultural values. He creates new values. The lesson of Hollein’s work, in the time of social media, AI and robotics, is that an architecture that is truly of-our-world is only possible through a confrontation between the abstract and disciplinary properties of architecture (its untimely qualities), and a (possibly colourful) way of speculating about our contemporary culture, our past and future. Ultimately, Hans Hollein keeps on telling us that architecture, when thought as such, is an enchanting way of producing knowledge, and it is so regardless of your or my ideological position.

SOURCE OF IMAGES: 01 — © Wikicommons, by Thomas Ledl (https:// de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Datei:Wohnung_L%C3%B6wenbach,_Adolf_Loos,_ Vienna_15.jpg) 02 — © Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria.

03 — © Giacomo Pala, 2018 04 — © Giacomo Pala, 2018 05 — © Az W / Architekturzentrum, Wien, Austria 06 — © Az W / Architekturzentrum, Wien, Austria

graphic design by Valentino Danilo Matteis

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