Modern Color/Modern Architecture: Amedee Ozenfant and the Genealogy of Color in Modern Architecture

Do colours have different spatial and architectural effects? What is the psychological impact of colour? Are colours endowed with symbolic meaning? What is a natural colour? These questions have a long, contentious history, especially among architects of the modern period. A key figure in that history is Amedee Ozenfant, painter, critic and friend of Le Corbusier, who in the first half of the 20th century founded a school in London where he conducted experiments and wrote about colour in architecture. Those experiments have been reconstructed for this book, which also includes reprints of his most important articles on the subject. The book provides a survey of this most contemporary topic that aims to inspire and inform designers and architects. Colour 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 colour of recent times, and especially within Modernism. This work is a thorough survey of the history and genesis of the most crucial questions concerning the role of architectural colour from the 19th century to the 21st.