The Color of Modernism

Paints, Pigments, and the Transformation of Modern Architecture in 1920s Germany

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350251366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

One of the most enduring and pervasive myths about modernist architecture is that it was white-pure white walls both inside and out. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The Color of Modernism explodes this myth of whiteness by offering a riot of color in modern architectural treatises, polemics, and buildings. Focusing on Germany in the early 20th century, one of modernism's most foundational and influential periods, it examines the different scientific and artistic color theories which were advanced by members of the German avant-garde, from Bruno Taut to Walter Gropius to Hans Scharoun. German color theory went on to have a profound influence on the modern movement, and Germany serves as the key case study for an international phenomenon which encompassed modern architects worldwide from le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto to Berthold Lubetkin and Lina Bo Bardi. Supported by accessible introductions to the development of color theory in philosophy, science and the arts, the book uses the German case to explore the new ways in which color was used in architecture and urban design, turning attention to an important yet overlooked aspect of the period. Much more than a mere correction to the historical record, the book leads the reader on an adventure into the color-filled worlds of psychology, the paranormal, theories of sensory perception, and pleasure, showing how each in turn influenced the modern movement. The Color of Modernism will fundamentally change the way the early modernist period is seen and discussed.

CHAPTER ONE

Color in German Architecture of the 1920s

Color Blindness

About halfway through a lecture on early modernism, a distinguished architectural historian gestured toward the screen as a slide showing the stairwell in Alvar Aalto’s Paimio sanatorium flashed behind the dais; the slide showed walls of stark white, floors of bright yellow, a banister in electric blue, and window mullions in a vibrant red. Yet, inexplicably, the speaker said, “As you are all aware, first generation modernism was white.” This historian’s momentary color blindness was not an aberration but is symptomatic of the way that color in early modern architecture has been treated by architectural historians, and many architects, since the beginning; the whiteness of parts of the building, or some buildings, overshadows the use of color¹ (Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 The stair in Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium showing the primary colors: red window mullions, blue banister, and yellow floor. © Ben Gilbert/Welcome Collection CC BY-NC 4.0.

One of the most enduring and pervasive myths about early modernism is that it was white. This was true nowhere in Europe, least of all in Germany, where Bruno Taut published his famous “Ruf zum farbigen Bauen” (Call to Colored Architecture) in 1919 before leading a motley effort to invent new ways of using color in architecture and urban design. The myth of whiteness survives in spite of the fact that the first visions for a postwar utopian world as drawn by members of the German Gläserne Kette (Crystal Chain) group and exhibitors at the Unbekannte Architekten (Unknown Architects) exhibition in 1919–20 proposed multicolored buildings or that much of the architecture in the early modern period used color in a variety of ways. Architects and designers as diverse as Taut, Richard Döcker, Paul Goesch, Walter Gropius, Wenzel Hablik, Carl Krayl, Adolf Rading, and Hans Scharoun developed new approaches to color application on the exterior and interior of buildings based on the latest color theories in art and science. They surveyed the state of color theory from Goethe’s 1810 Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) and Michel Eugène Chevreul’s 1836 The Laws of Contrast in Color to more contemporary treatises like Albert H. Munsell’s Color System of 1905 and Wilhelm Ostwald’s Farbenfibel (Color Primer) of 1917, and synthesized these theories to develop new ways of using color. In 1912, the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky wrote his influential theory of color, On the Spiritual in Art, which reverberated in the art and architecture circles of the day.² Kandinsky’s ideas were particularly important to architects since he tied color to both form and space. Often working closely with contemporary artists, architects developed an astonishing breadth of approaches that ranged from using color as surface ornament, to using color as space-making element, color as the agent of emotional charge, and color as the quality that could illusionistically dissolve the surface of a wall to transform physical enclosure and architecture into dematerialized abstract entities. Thus, color was integral to the spatial quality of design, not applied as an afterthought, and it was a key aspect of the work of many architects developing new aesthetic systems.

In 1901, the famous German art critic Karl Scheffler perceptively wrote, “the joy of color phenomena is so spirited that we have often thought about it: art history gives us no scale with which we can measure or consider the feelings for color and therefore this subject has only had a very marginal position.”³ Scheffler emphasizes the pervasive lack of consideration for color in theories and histories of art and architecture, despite the critical importance of color to both art forms. “Then you search to find a work in which, without the help of architectonic-poetic means, color is also vigorously stylized like form and line in architecture.”⁴ And, Scheffler concludes, there is none. He does not mean that color is not an integral part of architectural design or art—only that it has not been systematically examined and theorized. Considering that he was writing toward the end of the period in which bold color was used on and in buildings in Jugendstil art and designs, his assertions are even more surprising. He stresses that color meaning is a “cultural product,” constructed by society, and that it is constantly changing. Scheffler appears to foresee the developments in color application that will occur only a few years later when he writes, “Contemporary people exist in a strange relationship to color. Our time, that is dependent on forms of the past, like no other [time], invented a way of painting that is color-wise independent.”⁵ By this Scheffler means that painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impressionists and postimpressionists, had begun to use color independent of nature and natural representation, based on new sets of laws and ordering systems. They used color to convey emotion, impressions, and psychological states of mind; and the corollary in architecture was about to emerge.

Scheffler was particularly emphatic about the lack of color sense in architectural design, writing, “but [if] one seeks to find a work in which, without the help of architectonic-poetic-means, color is stylized as energetically as form and line in architecture, one will not encounter one.”⁶ According to art historian and museum curator Alfred Lichtwark, who wrote just four years after Scheffler, Germans were not known for their color sense.⁷ On the contrary, they were generally regarded as lacking in any color sensibility whatsoever, whether in painting or fashion or architecture. Lichtwark believed that this lack of color sense had roots in German culture and language. He points to a common German problem with properly identifying colors by name, and the lack of adequate words in the German language to differentiate colors from one another to explain this situation.⁸

While Scheffler’s now well-known essay is usually held up as an affirmation of the newfound primacy of color in visual art, the essay was prescient on many levels. The transformation in attitudes toward color that occurred in the arts during the second half of the nineteenth century marked a critical shift in the centuries-old debates regarding the dominance of line, or disegno, versus color, or colorito.⁹ At the same time, Scheffler noted the wide-ranging experimentation with color across artistic disciplines: he is one of the first commentators to discuss architecture and interior applications of color use in concert with developments in the visual arts. Scheffler outlined the principal ways in which architects and painters were experimenting with color at the time: probing visual and optical effects together with perceptual responses, experimenting with psychological and affective impressions, creating symbolic meaning by the choice of particular colors, and even exploring the synesthetic relationships between sound, form, and color. The divisions in artistic treatment that Scheffler identified in 1901 were still among the governing differences in approaches to color during the 1920s, when architects in Germany were experimenting with color applications in architecture, although in practice most architects were testing multiple color effects simultaneously. To Scheffler’s list should be added the use of color to create a model of fourth-dimensional space or to fashion a way into that fourth dimension. Many architects in the period were fascinated by the idea that there was another, invisible spatial dimension beyond the three with which we measure the physical world, and experimented with ways of making it visible or even accessible. It should also be mentioned that synesthesia was not a major interest for architects and therefore will not be treated in this book.

The list of architects who tried different palettes and ways of using color is lengthy and therefore beyond the scope of a single volume. This book will therefore trace the theoretical underpinnings of 1920s color practice and proceed to outline some of the more interesting and representative examples. Rudolf Steiner used color to create a portal to a mystical otherworld; Adolf Rading, Walter Gropius, and Hinnerk Scheper adopted a practice akin to the French painting tradition, using color to enhance visual effects in, and perceptions of, space; while Bruno Taut and Otto Haesler experimented with the affective power of color in spatial applications, as asserted by painters like Kandinsky. Taut, Haesler, and Krayl all experimented with vibrant colors on the exterior of buildings in a bid to invigorate the visual dimension of the city; their work was one of the only modern examples that had antecedents in traditional German architecture from the Middle Ages through the Baroque. The work of Rading, and to a great degree Finsterlin, Goesch, Hablik, Krayl, and Taut, can also be seen as an attempted foray into fourth-dimensional space, achieved by using optical effects of color, dissolution of spatial boundaries, and the abstraction of architectural confines to suggest entry into another, metaphysical spatial dimension.

The importance of color in architecture during the 1910s and 1920s has been largely overlooked for several reasons: the theoretical positioning of early modernism in the beginning of the twentieth century; the ways in which early modernism’s history as initially written was coupled with unease and doubt about color; and the lack of any systematic study of color theory in the arts before John Gage’s groundbreaking books, Color and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism and Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction in 1999 and 2000—many years after the early modern period.¹⁰ Early historians of the German Neues Bauen, the German name for early modernism, often emphasized the supposed formal and aesthetic purity of the new, rational approach to design over a more complex and nuanced interpretation. Siegfried Giedion’s monograph, Space, Time and Architecture, epitomizes this approach, focusing on buildings composed of simple, orthogonal volumes that were often predominantly white stucco, rather than addressing the wide variety of formal strategies employed at the time. The well-publicized Deutsche Werkbund housing exhibitions in Stuttgart (1927), Breslau (1929), and Vienna (1932) contributed to the impression that the new architecture was largely colorless, since most of the buildings were covered in white stucco and had white walls on the interior, especially in Stuttgart where Mies van der Rohe had mandated a uniform appearance to the designs¹¹ (Figure 1.2). Yet even in Stuttgart, color was critical to projects such as Le Corbusier’s and Hans Scharoun’s buildings. Exhibitions like Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s 1932 International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in New York perpetuated a particular image for the new architecture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, similar to Giedion’s approach, that was only partly accurate. Hitchcock and Johnson intentionally omitted work by important architects, like Willem Marinus Dudok in the Netherlands, who mixed functionalist spatial planning and new materials like reinforced concrete with traditional materials like brick and thatch, and Gunnar Asplund in Sweden, who used a similar approach to Dudok but with a Swedish inflection, because Dudok’s and Asplund’s work did not conform to the image that Hitchcock and Johnson wished to project through the exhibition. They also omitted Bruno Taut’s work, much of which was wildly colored, and the work of Hermann Finsterlin, whose designs fused unusual form with color. Of course, many of the iconic projects from the 1920s were indeed largely white, at least on the exterior, like Walter Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus and Adolf Rading’s Dr. Rabe House. Paradoxically, although Gropius and Rading used color in inventive ways together with whiteness, this aspect of their work is often marginalized, downplayed, or ignored.

FIGURE 1.2 A view of the Weisenhofsiedlung housing estate showing the whiteness of the architecture. © Landesmedienzentrum Baden-Wurttemberg.

Numerous scholars have perpetuated the misconception that modern architecture is colorless. Countless architectural historians since the 1920s, and since Giedion, into the present, have focused on whiteness as a hallmark quality of modernism, to the extent that opening almost any text on modernism will reveal a predominance of illustrations of buildings dressed in white stucco. Mark Wigley famously argued that white be recognized as a color, which elides consideration of other colors in early modernism.¹² Wigley also constructs a series of dichotomous relationships between whiteness and color to explain the popularity of white: color is sexual, but white is intellectual; color is feminine, but white is masculine; color is changeable, but white is immutable; color is ornamental, but white is sterile. While Wigley presents a fascinating and original argument, his analysis only pertains to a very limited range of architecture; it ignores the nuanced and differing deployments of color by many early modernists, as well as those who used unadorned natural materials on the exterior of their projects.¹³ In his Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars, Paul Overy explored the relationship between whiteness and hygiene, making “white” a central facet of his presentation of early modern architecture.¹⁴ While Overy is correct ab...