Colour for Architecture Today

Tom Porter, Byron Mikellides, Tom Porter, Byron Mikellides

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415438148
• eBook ISBN: 9781134719839
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

What role does colour play in our built environment? How are our attitudes to colour changing? What potential do new technologies bring for the use of colour and light in architecture?

Combining real examples from practice with colour theory, this book will help you to fully understand the role and impact of colour in our urban spaces. Contributions from leading architects Will Alsop, Legorreta and Legorreta, John Outram, Sauerbruch Hutton and Neuterlings Riedijk accompany those from artists Alain Bony and Yann Kersalé, and from colour researchers such as Kristina Enberg and Anders Hård, who developed the Natural Colour System. Topics include:

• how and why we see colour
• methodologies in the documentation of traditional colours
• the development of new urban palettes
• recent colour psychology research
• the effect of light levels on human behaviour
• dramatic colour effects achievable with light
• guidelines for future deployment of colour in the built environment.

This is a sequel to the immensely influential Colour for Architecture, published in 1976. Much has changed in 30 years; new cutting edge technologies and materials have emerged allowing architects to experiment with colour and light in an energy efficient and sustainable way, paving the way for a more colourful and exciting built environment.

Part 1
Why and How we See Colour

Visual perception is a creative act; each time we visually survey the world around us, data are transferred via the optic nerve to the visual cortex in the brain where the image in view is instantly reconstructed and its meaning determined. However, an important dimension of this perception is that it is also seen in colour – colour vision also being an integral part of the creative act of seeing.

This results from electro-chemical processes taking place in the brain. The fact that colour is an experience within us – that is, within the viewer rather than what is viewed – is demonstrated by our experience of afterimages, when, beyond the initial sensation, colour continues to be experienced in the eye and brain. This is further qualified when we witness colour in our dreams or, with closed eyes, when we can mentally conjure up colour in our mind’s eye.

Part 1 examines some basic facts and theories concerning colour vision. Our perception of colour is influenced by the spectral distribution of the light source, the characteristic of the object in terms of absorption reflection and transmission, what goes on in the eye and brain and, finally, our personal experiences in terms of age, gender and psychological make-up. Various colour phenomena and experiences related to the above factors are discussed, such as complementary colours, colour constancy, adaptation and contrast as well as colour blindness and attempts to classify colour. Both the Trichromatic theory proposed by Thomas Young and Hering’s Opponent theory are discussed, as well as theories based on recent discoveries of ‘double opponent’ neurons beyond the retina and thalamus. These neurons cover more opponent combinations that reflect the probability distributions of ambiguous retinal light spectra. As technological innovations in neuroscience become more and more sophisticated, our understanding of what happens in the eye and brain becomes clearer but not yet sufficiently understood. Perhaps the best verdict to date of this theorizing comes from the distinguished scientist Richard Gregory: ‘There is a conflict between designing experiments simple enough for analysis and sufficiently complex to reveal the full richness of phenomena. So science is an art. However, like the arts, it is not completely mastered.’¹

In Chapter 3, Professor Peter F. Smith considers the vital role that colour plays in both our appreciation of beauty and as an essential component of sustainability in the twenty-first century. Buildings and townscapes can only be truly sustainable if they also display the quality of beauty. Referring to the historical and psychological literature on aesthetics, he proposes that the same principles governing proportion and harmony also apply in the realm of colour.

However, the opening chapter by Nicholas Humphrey describes the evolution of colour vision and its crucial function as part of our biological survival kit. Humphrey reminds the reader of our good fortune in being able to see colour, and how and why it contributes to our survival and well-being. His fascinating account of the significance that people attach to the colour red by reference to psychological, physiological, medical and anthropological studies is a further testimony of the importance of colour in so many different contexts. For the designer who is becoming more and more responsible for colouring and lighting our internal and external spaces, he poses the challenge of either using colour in an arbitrary way or building upon our biological predispositions and study how colour is used in nature.

1
The Colour Currency of Nature

Nicholas Humphrey

Mankind as a species has little reason to boast about his sensory capacities. A dog’s sense of smell, a bat’s hearing, a hawk’s visual acuity are all superior to our own. But in one respect we may justifiably be vain: our ability to see colours is a match for any other animal. In this respect we have, in fact, surprisingly few rivals. Among mammals, only our nearest relatives, the monkeys and apes, share our ability – all others are nearly or completely colour-blind. In the animal kingdom as a whole, colour vision occurs only in some fishes, reptiles, insects and birds.

No one reading this book can doubt mankind’s good fortune. The world seen in monochrome would be altogether a drearier, less attractive place to live in. But Nature did not grant colour vision to human beings and other animals simply to indulge their aesthetic sensibilities. The ability to see colour can only have evolved because it contributes to biological survival.

The question of how colour vision has evolved is – or should be – an important issue for psychologists (and for designers). If we were to understand how the seeing of natural colour has in the distant past contributed to our ancestors’ lives we might be better placed to appreciate what colour in ‘artificial’ situations means to us today. Yet this is not in fact an issue which has been much explored. Indeed, few psychologists, for all their obsession with the physiological mechanism of colour vision, have asked what to an evolutionary biologist must seem the obvious question: where – and why – does colour occur in nature?

It may seem odd to tack ‘why?’ on to the question ‘where?’ But the question why is crucial, for the evolution of colour vision is intimately linked to the evolution of colour on the surface of the Earth. It may go without saying that in a world without colour, animals would have no use for colour vision; but it does need saying that in a world without animals possessing colour vision there would in fact be very little colour. The variegated colours which characterize the Earth’s surface (and make the Earth perhaps the most colourful planet of the universe) are in the main organic colours, carried by the tissues of plants and animals – and most of these life-born colours have been designed in the course of evolution to be seen.

There are, of course, exceptions. Before life evolved, the drab landscape of the Earth may have been relieved occasionally by, say, a volcanic fire, a rainbow, a sunset, perhaps some tinted crystals on the ground. And before colour vision evolved, some living tissues were already ‘fortuitously’ coloured – blood was red, foliage green, although the redness of haemoglobin and the greenness of chlorophyll are wholly incidental to their biochemical roles. But the most striking colours of nature, those of flowers and fruits, the plumage of birds, the gaudy fishes of a coral reef, are all ‘deliberate’ evolutionary creations which have been selected to act as visual signals carrying messages to those who have the eyes to see them. The pigments which impart visible colour to the petals of a dandelion or a robin’s breast are there for no other purpose.

We may presume that colour vision has not evolved to see the rare colours of inorganic nature, since rainbows and sunsets have no importance to survival. Nor is it likely to have evolved to see simply the greenness of grass or the redness of raw flesh, since those animals which feed chiefly on grass or on flesh are colour-blind. It can and almost surely has evolved alongside signal colouration to enable animals to detect and interpret nature’s colour-coded messages.

The messages conveyed by signal colouration are of many kinds. Sometimes the message is simple: ‘come here’ addressed to an ally (the colour of a flower serving to attract a pollinating insect, the colour of a fruit to attract a seed-dispersing bird), or ‘keep away’ addressed to an enemy (the colour of a stinging insect or a poisonous toadstool serving to deter a potential predator). Sometimes the message is more complex, as when colour is used for communication in a social context in courtship or aggressive encounters (a peacock displaying his fan, a monkey flashing his coloured genitalia). Whatever the level of the message, signal colours commonly have three functions: they catch attention, they transmit information, and they directly affect the emotions of the viewer – an orange arouses appetite in a monkey, a yellow wasp fear in a fly-catcher, the red lips of a young woman passion in a man.

Primates came on the scene relatively late in evolutionary history, and the surface of the Earth must already have been given much of its colour through the interaction of plants, insects, reptiles and birds. The early tree-dwelling primates moved in on an ecological niche previously occupied by birds: they picked the same fruits, caught the same insects, and they were in danger of being harmed by the same stings and the same poisons. To compete effectively with birds, primates needed to evolve colour vision of the same order. It is for that reason, I suspect, that the trichromatic colour vision of most primates (including humans) is in fact so similar to that, say, of a pigeon (although, as it happens, the selectivity of the three types of colour receptor is achieved by quite different physiological mechanisms in primates and birds). Once primates had joined the colour vision club, however, they too must have played their part in the progressive evolution of natural colour, influencing through selection the colours both of themselves and of other plants and animals.

Then, not far back in history, the emergence of homo sapiens marked a turning point in the use of colour. For human beings hit on a new and unique skill – the ability to apply colour in places where it did not grow. Most probably they first used artificial colour to adorn their own bodies, painting their skins, investing themselves with jewels and feathers, dressing in coloured clothes. But in time they went further and began to apply colour to objects around them, especially to things which they themselves had made … until the use of colour became eventually almost a trademark of the human species.

In the early stages, humans probably continued the natural tradition of using colour primarily for its signal function, to indicate maybe status or value. And to some extent this tradition has continued to the present day, as testified, for instance, in the use we make of colour in ceremonial dress, traffic signals, political emblems, or the rosettes awarded to horses at a show. But at the same time the advent of modern technology has brought with it a debasement of the colour currency. Today almost every object that rolls off the factory production line, from motor cars to pencils, is given a distinctive colour – and for the most part these colours are meaningless. As I look around the room I’m working in, man-made colour shouts back at me from every surface: books, cushions, a rug on the floor, a coffee cup, a box of staples – bright blues, reds, yellows, greens. There is as much colour here as in any tropical forest. Yet whilst almost every colour in the forest would be meaningful, here in my study almost nothing is. Colour anarchy has taken over.

The indiscriminate use of colour has no doubt dulled modern humans’ biological response to it. From the first moment that a baby is given a string of multi-coloured – but otherwise identical – beads to play with, she is unwittingly being taught to ignore colour as a signal. Yet I do not believe that our long involvement with colour as a signal in the course of evolution can be quite forgotten. Even though the modern use of colour may frequently be arbitrary, humans’ response to it surely continues to show traces of their evolutionary heritage. So people persist in seeking meaning from colour even where no meaning is intended, they find colour attention-catching, they expect colour to carry information and to some extent at least they tend to be emotionally aroused.

The most striking illustration of human beings’ deep evolutionary involvement with colour is the significance that people still attach to the colour red. I was first alerted to the peculiar psychological importance of red by some experiments not on humans but on rhesus monkeys.¹ For some years I had been studying the visual preferences of monkeys, using the apparatus shown here (Figure 1.1).

1.1 Rhesus monkey in testing chamber.

The monkey sits in a dark testing chamber with a screen at one end onto which one of two alternative slides can be projected. The monkey controls the presentation of the slides by pressing a button, each press producing one or the other slide in strict alternation: thus when he likes what he sees he must hold the button down, when he wants a change he must release and press again. I examined ‘colour preference’ in this situation by letting the monkeys choose between two plain fields of coloured light. All the monkeys that were tested showed strong and consistent preferences. When given a choice between, for instance, red and blue, they tended to spend three or four times as long with the blue as the red. Overall, the rank order of colours in order of preference was blue, green, yellow, orange, red. When each of the colours was separately paired with a ‘neutral’ white field, red and orange stood out as strongly aversive, blue and green as mildly attractive. Direct observation of the monkeys in the testing situation indicated that they were considerably upset by the red light. When I deliberately added to their stress by playing loud and unpleasant background noise throughout the test, the aversion to red light became even more extreme. Further experiments showed that they were reacting to the red light exactly as if it was inducing fear.²

This aversion to red light is not unique to rhesus monkeys. The same thing has been found with baboons and also, more surprisingly, with pigeons. But what about humans? Experiments on colour preference in humans have given results which appear at first sight to be at odds with those in other primates. When people are asked to rank colours according to how much they ‘like’ them, red often comes high if not top of the list, although there is a wide variation between individuals depending among other things on personality, age, sex and culture. However, I am inclined to give little weight to such findings for two reasons. First, as Tom Porter has emphasized, the choice of a ‘favourite’ colour may be heavily biased by changes in fashion; indeed, when Porter tested people from social backgrounds where fashion probably has relatively little influence – African children, on the one hand, the residents of an Oxford old people’s home, on the other – he found that both groups ranked colours in much the same way as did my monkeys, consistently preferring the blue end of the spectrum to the red.³ Second, and more important, there is a methodological problem with most of the preference experiments, for the question ‘Which do you like best?’ is really much too simple a question to ask of a human subject: people may say they ‘like’ a colour for a host of different reasons depending both on the context in which they imagine the colour occurring and on how they construe the term ‘like’. It would be manifestly foolish to ask people the abstract question ‘Do you like better to be excited or to be soothed?’, and it may perhaps be equally foolish to ask ‘Do you like red more than blue?’ To discover the significance of colours to human beings we must look to rather more specific studies.

I shall briefly list some of the particular evidence which demonstrates how, in a variety of contexts, red seems to have a very special significance for humans:

1. Large fields of red light induce physiological symptoms of emotional arousal – changes in heart rate, skin resistance and the electrical activity of the brain.⁴
2. In patients suffering from certain pathological disorders, for instance, cerebellar palsy, these physiological effects become exaggerated – in cerebellar patients red light may cause intolerable distress, exacerbating the disorders of posture and movement, lowering pain thresholds and causing a general disruption of thought and skilled behaviour.⁵
3. When the affective value of colours is measured by a technique, the ‘semantic differential’, which is far subtler than a simple preference test, people rate red as a ‘heavy’, ‘powerful’, ‘active’, ‘hot’ colour.⁶
4. When the ‘apparent weight’ of colours is measured directly by asking people to find the balance point between two discs of colour, red is consistently judged to be the heaviest.⁷
5. In the evolution of human languages, red is without exception the first colour word to enter the vocabulary – in a study of 96 languages, Berlin and Kay found 30 in which the only colour word (apart from black and white) was red.⁸
6. In the developme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART 1 Why and How We See Colour
• PART 2 Colour Mapping: colour at the city scale
• PART 3 The NCS (Natural Color System) and Research Applications
• PART 4 Architects and Colour at the Building Scale
• PART 5 Colour Psychology and Colour Aesthetics
• PART 6 Into the Light
• Notes
• Index
• Image credits