Modern Color/Modern Architecture

Amédée Ozenfant and the Genealogy of Color in Modern Architecture

William W. Braham

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351725583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

This title was first published in 2002. This really is a text that will fill a long-felt want. A key figure in that history is Amédée Ozenfant, painter, critic and friend of Le Corbusier, who in the first half of this century founded a school in London where he conducted experiments and wrote about color in architecture. Those experiments have been reconstructed for the book, which also includes reprints of his most important articles on the subject. This book provides a fascinating survey of this most contemporary topic that will inspire and inform designers and architects. Color has often been regarded as the final dressing of a building, subject to the vagaries of fashion and left to the client to select. There have been a number of studies of polychromy in the architecture of the more distant past, particularly in relation to modern conservation practices, but there is little or nothing on the architectural color of recent times, and especially within Modernism.

1
Ozenfant and the genealogy of architectural color

We must endeavor to introduce a little order into this business, or at least sense into a great deal of it. But what is sense without order? We must try to find some method of arriving at some sort of order - one that will at least enable us to escape from this vagueness in the design of colour.

(Ozenfant, 1937)^l

In 1937 the French painter Amédée Ozenfant wrote six articles about color for the highly respected Architectural Review in London. He had emigrated from Paris the year before and abruptly announced his intention to open a school of architectural color and decoration. The articles that he wrote advance a uniquely intriguing proposal for 'colour solidity' in architecture and are as witty and insightful as any of the more famous pieces that he wrote with Le Corbusier in the 1920s, but before discussing them we first have to ask some very basic questions such as 'Why and in what ways do architects use or even care about color?' Even the way we phrase such questions is shaped by deeper assumptions about form, function and appearance in architecture. Mark Wigley has re-examined those premises in his 1995 White Walls, Designer Dresses, arguing that even the most neutral and apparently stable element of modern architecture - the white wall - can itself be seen as a form of clothing and an element of fashion.² That book, along with groundbreaking work by scholars such as Arthur Rüegg and John Gage, radically changed our understanding of color and its role in the formation of the modern architecture of the 1920s and 1930s.³ Ozenfant's career as a painter and teacher, his collaboration with Le Corbusier and even his clothing boutique, 'Amédée', recommend him as a guide to a full genealogy of color in modern architecture.

To be frank, Ozenfant was a better critic and writer than he ever was a painter (or dress designer). When he and Le Corbusier exhibited their first collaborative paintings in 1918, it was their jointly authored manifesto of Purism, Après le Cubisme, that really attracted attention. Their rapid emergence as leading figures in the European avant-garde owed less to the early products of Purism, the self-declared successor style to Cubism, than to the polemical nature of L'Esprit Nouveau, the journal with which they jointly advanced their ideas from 1920 to 1925. L'Esprit Nouveau not only led the artistic rappel à l'ordre of that period, but the name 'Le Corbusier' was itself conceived as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret's pseudonym for his architectural work in the journal, and his first four books, of which Vers une architecture remains the most famous, were largely compilations of articles conceived and written as part of their intensely collaborative Purist alliance.⁴ As a result Ozenfant is largely remembered among architects as just that: the early collaborator of Le Corbusier, the one who taught him to paint.

It is little wonder that Ozenfant terminated the collaboration in 1925 when he found himself overshadowed by the ever-expanding persona of Le Corbusier. By any other measure Ozenfant's subsequent career as artist, teacher and critic would have been deemed remarkably successful. He began teaching with the painter Fernand Léger soon after the Purist collaboration ended and later founded his own atelier, 'l'Académie Ozenfant', in the residence and studio that Le Corbusier designed for him. He moved the atelier to London as the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in 1936 and then to New York in 1938, where it became one of the more popular independent art schools of the 1950s as New York became the new Paris. He continued to write widely and on many subjects after the end of L'Esprit Nouueau, completing his book Art in 1928, which was soon translated into English as Foundations of Modern Art and remained in print until the 1950s.⁵

The standard biographical sketch suggests that Ozenfant's connection to architecture was through Le Corbusier, but a more complete introduction would recall the conditions at the beginning of their collaboration. Though Ozenfant trained as a quite traditional painter he spent the year before meeting Le Corbusier supervising the construction of a concrete factory building. Conversely, although Le Corbusier had just completed his first independent buildings in Switzerland, he was determining to become a painter. Their collaboration is emblematic of the intense encounters between architecture and painting that shaped the avant-garde of the 1920s. Not surprisingly, their collaboration produced a decidedly architectural style of painting, orthographically portraying everyday objects and rejecting any of the Cubist use of multiple points of view or the Neo-Impressionist attention to perceptual variations in light and color.

In the early Purist manifestos, color was simply deemed secondary to form, a conclusion that would prevail when Le Corbusier began to build again in the mid-1920s, carefully limiting his elegant polychromy to the visual reinforcement of discrete architectural surfaces. The Purist approach was in opposition to the more aggressive use of color by Theo van Doesburg and the De Stijl group, who allowed bold primary colors to alter the formal and spatial appearance of their buildings. Such disputes are not original to the avant-garde of the 1920s and that is the basic thesis of this book: architects have had difficulty deciding how to use color since at least the polychromy dispute of 1830, when the austere whiteness of the Neoclassical was first called into question.⁶ These kinds of difficulties with color constitute a central element in the 'tradition' of modern architecture and will be examined in depth in Chapter 4.

The belief that the architecture of the avant-garde of the 1920s was largely white has concealed what was in fact a quite vigorous use and discussion of color. The explicitly colorful postmodernist reaction of the 1980s largely reinforced myths about the whiteness of this avant-garde and created an essentially nostalgic picture of nineteenth-century polychromatic explorations, imagining them as the final remnant of meaningful traditional practices rather than as a first encounter with the increasingly uncertain conditions of the modern era. Debates about color are an often small element in these larger encounters, but like slips of the tongue or other seemingly minor details, color helps reveal those issues that have been suppressed, allowing architects a more critical insight into their own practices.

The 1920s and 1930s remain a critical moment for modern color use, and for modern architecture itself. This is the period to which architects return again and again, whether to celebrate or denounce the visibly revolutionary break with previous practices. Many recent studies have established just how many contradictions existed within that period, and the canonizing histories by Siegfried Giedion or Nikolaus Pevsner underscored the decades of experimentation that preceded the modernist rupture.⁷ The purpose of this study is not to tell that history again, nor to simply re-explore the new insights about whiteness or fashion, but to examine the origins of our particular understanding of architectural color. The point of departure for this genealogy is the proposal for 'colour solidity' that Amédée Ozenfant advanced in his articles for the Architectural Review 1937, a somewhat paradoxical proposal that demands an account of its genesis.

Unlike Le Corbusier, Theo van Doesburg, Bruno Taut, Alberto Sartoris, El Lissitzky, Fernand Léger or other members of the avant-garde who were actively experimenting with architectural color, Ozenfant did not write to explain or justify a particular practice, but to examine architectural color directly. Paradoxically, he drew both on his early association with the Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac, whose experiments with nineteenth-century theories of color and perception profoundly shaped modern painting, and on the principles of Purism that he and Le Corbusier had conceived as a rejection of precisely that tradition of optical experiment. Fie explained that architectural color became an issue because of the many radical changes in construction techniques and the newly transient nature of modern urban life to which he attributed what he called the 'divorce of painting and architecture' and which, like the tales about the whiteness of the new architecture, distracted architects from their own encounter with modern color.

To understand the problems that color induces in architecture, it is not enough simply to read Ozenfant's articles, though his article on 'English color' alone would provide a worthy course of study. Nor is it sufficient merely to review the projects and positions of the period. The examination of modern architectural color requires an investigation of the 'morality tale' that runs through modern architecture, a tale that warns against the dangers of decoration, symbolic representations and the appreciation of color's pleasures for their own sake. Such messages are conveyed in many settings by many means, mostly in the subtle ways in which table manners or conventions of dressing are learned, and they are just as often resisted by those questioning such lessons. As Gilles Deleuze has explained, a genealogy identifies the origins of a particular set of practices at the same time that it establishes the distance traveled from those origins, denying us any possibility of recovering the initial condition. A genealogical study of color also reveals the forms of prohibition and longing that prompt its investigation. Wigley has taught us about the complex aspirations that surround the use of whiteness, and this book seeks to develop the full genealogy of that condition, beginning with Ozenfant's complex notion of 'colour solidity'

Conceiving this work as a genealogy is not merely a metaphor, but a tactic for discovering the architectural values around which the modern architectural tradition has been assembled.⁸ Ozenfant's essay on the 'English Tradition' offered no simple rules of color selection, combination or use, but a vivid examination of the kinds of color differences - strong and gentle, constructive and destructive - with which that tradition was elaborated. His Architectural Review articles offer an equally strong warning about the fixing of such traditions, about the cultural changes and conditions that alter them, especially with such a visually changeable element as color. The articles contrast starkly with the dogmatic statements that he and Le Corbusier made about color in the various Purist documents, such as 'form is pre-eminent, color is only one of its accessories'.⁹ The scientific aspirations of those early years gave way to the more pragmatic and painterly understanding that Ozenfant developed through his work and writing in London, even though he continued to wrestle with the earlier terms he had employed.

Expectations about color methods have been influenced by scientific thinking since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, shaped by the belief that color practices should be based on some objectively true theory of color perception. Whatever the standards required in color science, such criteria have little relevance to decisions about the use of color in architecture Specific color palettes can be usefully invented again and again, translated to different situations and periods. That condition is generally feared among architects as the rule of fashion, because its relentless cycles can quickly render their work meaningless. The solution seems simple: exclude color and you exclude change and fashion. But of course all buildings have a color palette, even the whitest, most neutral or natural ones, and they too are subject to the dictates of fashion. The relationships among color palettes, among today's innovations and yesterday's fashions, can only be understood genealogically, as the cycling and recycling of specific values - solidity, authenticity and so on - discovered in and demonstrated through qualities such as color.

Modern color

Throughout his six articles in the Architectural Review, Ozenfant ruthlessly illustrated the difficulties that architects face when choosing, specifying or even thinking about color: 'At the moment when [the architect] is endeavouring to "materialize" his colour scheme (assuming that he has a clear idea, which is rare, of what he wants) he witnesses the most disappointing results. Everyone has noticed, with astonishment, the strange magics, the paradoxical colours, disclosed at the bottom of the painter's pot, when he has been asked to prepare a colour: "You know, a green something like this"; a rose "like that", "a yellow not too yellow". And the architect waves his hand in the air, his eyes half closed, in a dream.'¹⁰ Architecture has changed considerably since the late 1930s, although architects still close their eyes and wave their hands in the air when the discussion turns to color. Even today we are still modern in many of the same ways, still valuing neutral and natural colors, and still enjoying the pleasures of the explicitly or overly colorful as somewhat forbidden or excessive. Those similarities extend back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when color was first identified as a physiological and psychological phenomenon. Color became the emblem of a new subjectivity, of the modern psyche that actively participates in its own perceptions. The apparent orderliness of color - the sequence of hues in the spectrum and their rules of mixture - offered a compelling example of a fixed arrangement somehow produced by the subjective perceptual structure of the eye and brain.

Ozenfant searched for prin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Ozenfant and the genealogy of architectural color
• 2 Education of the eye: Ozenfant, Signac and purple shadows
• 3 Purism and the 'divorce of painting and architecture'
• 4 'Colour solidity': the appearance of architecture
• 5 Modern methods (after the divorce)
• 6 Natural, ornamental, symbolic and therapeutic
• Appendix: Ozenfant in the Architectural Review, 1937
• Bibliography
• Index