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Originally published in The Right Angle Journal, Vol.2 No.4, Summer 2019
www,therightanglejournal.com
Why Not Colour In Architecture?
Ian Ellingham, MBA, PhD, FRAIC
Chair, The Built Environment Open Forum Inc.
Associate, Cambridge Architectural Research Limited
Exterior colour might be one of the big enigmas in architecture. C. Howard Walker, architect
and teacher at MIT (in 1893), pointed out that colour has long been a part of architecture, and
gave numerous examples, but "...that it has always played an inferior part..."1 and offers the
opinion that where it has been used extensively, the results have often been "grotesque".
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein devoted his last book, the Remarks on Colour, written in
1950, to the matter. He commented that "...there is merely an inability to bring the concepts
into some kind of order. We stand there like the ox in front of the newly-painted stall door."2
But before the designer or manager decides to embark on the creation of a brightly coloured
building, some reflection on our reasons for avoiding extremes of colour is appropriate.
Even in the early 21st century the empirical research on exterior building colour remains quite
limited, with strands of research being variously speculative, physical, physiological, cultural,
psychological, artistic and perhaps even spiritual.3 Research into colour does go back to the
late 1800s and the earlier days of psychology, although much of it relied on observation and,
to a greater extent, personal experience.4 For example, Goethe in his Theory of Colours,
(1810) was essentially analyzing his personal responses, to different colours seen as related
to feelings. Wilhelm Wundt, in Outlines of Psychology (1897), saw red as being arousing, and
blue as subduing, again based on his personal biases and very general observations.
As the disciplines of psychology developed through the 20th century, experimentation with
colour expanded, with better methods and more sophisticated insights. More recent summary
of past research, found that generally it has been found that "...blue appeared to be the most
1 Walker, C. Howard; Andrews, Robert D.; Warren, H. Langford; Waterman, Marcus; Tompkins, F. H.; Bachmann,
Max and Hartmann, C. Sadakichi. "Color in Architecture", The Art Critic, Vol.1, No.1 (Nov., 1893). p.12.
2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Colour. Oakland: University of California Press, 1977. p.359.
3 Colours being associated with various religious functions and meanings.
4 Elliot, Andrew J. "A Historically Based Review of Empirical Work on Color and Psychological Functioning: Content,
Methods, and Recommendations for Future Research", Review of General Psychology, Online first publication: 20
Dec 2018. p.1.
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preferred color, followed by red:... saturated colors being particularly preferred. Men
especially preferred blue, whereas women, red..."5
Attempts to understand some of the reasons for colour preference have found that "People
like colors strongly associated with objects they like (e.g., blues with clear skies and clean
water) and dislike colors strongly associated with objects they dislike (e.g., browns with feces
and rotten food)."6 In evolutionary terms, this makes sense: we still like colours associated
with things that helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive, and are repelled by those that
might be harmful, and that some male-female differences in colour preferences might result
from the different roles filled during humanity's early days.
Unfortunately, much of the empirical research has yielded ambiguous results - and may not
apply to building exteriors anyway. "In short, humans respond to color more on the basis of
subliminal emotion than on grounds of rational consideration."7 Moreover, it is challenging to
determine whether one brain mediates colour stimuli the same way that another does. Do all
people, for example, experience forest green or sky blue in the same way. While we might
agree on what forest green is, we may experience different reactions to it. Exploration of
brain processes and how they form responses to colour is now underway using fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging), and we might expect new insights resulting from
those efforts.8
There are a number of possible reasons why research that may be relevant to the building
designer is limited. Researchers may not perceive a building's exterior colour as an important
aspect of their work, perhaps because of the entanglement with context, or because
researchers feel the matter belongs to a different discipline (perhaps architecture?). Looking
more specifically into architectural discussion of colour, one still finds a great deal of personal
opinion, and quotes of previous personal opinions, as in the work of Marcus and Matell.9
There are practical reasons for most building exteriors not being explicitly colourful. Exterior
environments are hard on building materials so it is often wise to select materials that do not
5 Ibid. p.3.
6 Palmer, Stephen E. Schloss, Karen B. and Kay, Paul. "An ecological valence theory of human color preference",
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol.107, No.19 (May 11, 2010),
p.8877.
7 Finlay, Robert. "Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History", Journal of World History, Vol.18, No.4,
(2007), pp. 383-431. p.13.
8 Racey, Chris; Franklin, Anna; Bird, Chris M. "The processing of color preference in the brain", NeuroImage. vol.191,
pp.529-536. preprint downloaded from bioRxiv, 12 April, 2019.
9 Marcus, Gert and Matell, Hans. "Colors on the Exterior Walls of the Buildings of the Apartment Complex at Vastra
Flemingsberg, Huddinge, Sweden", Leonardo, Vol.12, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 89-93.
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suffer from obvious fading. Brick, stone, terracotta, cementitious rendering, concrete,
concrete block and perhaps mud brick, provide a range of greys, beiges and earth-toned
colours. In some places, such as in St.John's Newfoundland, exteriors are painted in vivid
colours, but these tend to be wood clad, and have to be painted periodically anyway.
Ceramic tile is one traditional material that has offered colour possibilities, but the current
conditions of the mosaic-tiled exteriors of communist-era buildings in Europe demonstrate the
havoc that freeze-thaw environments and limited maintenance can wreak on that material.10
There is also the fact that we tend to prefer what we find familiar, sometimes expressed as
the 'preference-for-prototypes' theory.11 Many classical buildings of antiquity, those that have
served as models for centuries of new development, were originally brightly coloured, but
over time weathering had its effect, so the developing renaissance civilizations were
presented with buildings that were largely the colours of the materials they were constructed
from - any colouring having faded or fallen off centuries before.
In addition, until fifty or so years ago, most architectural representation was black and white -
being either sketches or photography. Coloured paintings were relatively rare (and
expensive). Even today, in the education of architects, colour is usually pushed into the
background - think of all those models being built with pristine white foamboard, and those
black and white sketches. In my own experience, I don't recall any of my instructors in
architecture school spending much time discussing colour.
The Victorians, rediscovering the medieval past, were not ashamed of using colour, both
inside and outside, and some architects such as William Butterfield (1814-1900) who used
brick and ceramic colours and patterns extensively and architecturally - perhaps even
riotously.12 In other settings, iron structures were often picked out with colour, to differentiate
materials. However, in early functionalist modernism, colour, like ornament, was seen to be
superfluous, and white walls were the ideal.13 As Eric Arthur (1898-1982) suggested
"...modern materials and construction have an intrinsic beauty..."14 Arthur supported the
10 The 2017 film Built to Last - Relics of Communist Era Architecture, directed by Czech-Japanese filmmaker Haruna
Honcoop, shows numerous examples of buildings with failed exterior tile-clad walls.
11 Slatter P.E. and Whitfield T. W. (1977) "Room function and appropriateness judgements of colour". Perceptual and
Motor Skills, 1977, Vol.45, pp.1068-1070.
12 All Saints Church, St.Margaret Street, in London is one example and worth visiting.
13 Braham , William W. "Solidity of the Mask: Color Contrasts in Modern Architecture". RES: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, No.39 (Spring, 2001), pp.192-214. p.193.
14 Arthur, Eric. "How to appreciate architecture", Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal, February, Vol.13,
No.2, (1936) pp.32-33.
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concept of modernism, but again there was no experimental evidence for such a statement - it
was the opinion generally accepted by the architectural leading edge of the time.
Research undertaken since the 1960s has indicated that too many materials or colours can
decrease the esteem given to a design - one reason being that excessive complexity will
decrease the legibility of the building.15 16 17 A small study using interior spaces found that
appropriateness may be a major determinant of evaluative responses to interior colour,
supporting the more general hypothesis that such responses to colour are partially dependent
upon the object with which the color is associated.18
Differences between some styles (Modern vs. Georgian or Art Nouveau) have been found to
have an impact on the selections of appropriate colour. In a study using colours and two-
dimensional shapes subjects used "...a complex rule in which the weight attributed to one
element depends on the value of the other element."19 The results, it was determined, did not
depend on whether the subject was an 'expert' (artist or architect?). In other words,
preference for architectural colours is highly dependent upon what they are being used for,
and where they are being used - all of this underlining the level of cultural dependence.
Historically, in numerous Eurasian societies, bright colours were a marker of lower class -
people of taste did not display bright colours, which were often seen as "...superficial,
subjective, irrational, self-indulgent, sensual, disorderly, and deceptive".20 While we may not
know why this is the case, we recognize that different cultures relate to colour differently, in
keeping with differing historical, political, economic and religious conditions, as well as the
practical reasons of the availability and cost of different pigments.
Colour and colour combinations are highly subject to fashion - with shifts in fashion being
shorter than buildings' life expectancies, or even shorter then the periods between
refurbishments, which may make it difficult to undertake research that could offer long-term
guidance, especially for long-lived assets. Recall the pastels (combined with splashes of
15 Kaplan, Stephen and Kaplan, Rachel. Cognition and Environment: Functioning in an uncertain world, Ann Arbour:
Ulrich's, (1983), p.18.
16 Kumar, Minu and Garg, Nitike. "Aesthetic principles and cognitive emotion appraisals: How much of the beauty lies
in the eye of the beholder?" Journal of Consumer Psychology, 20, pp.485-494. (2010) p.487.
17 Stamps, Arthur E. III. "Mystery, complexity, legibility and coherence: A meta-analysis", Journal of Environmental
Psychology, 24, (2004). pp.1-16. p.2.
18 Slatter and Whitfield op.cit. (1977), p.1070.
19 Lazreg, Cecilia Karpowicz and Mullet, Etienne. "Judging the Pleasantness of Form-Color Combinations", The
American Journal of Psychology, Vol.114, No.4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 511-533. p.530.
20 Finlay, (2018). p.20.
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bright colours) that were favoured in the 1950s and 1960s, the psychedelic-inspired bright
colours from the hippie/LSD period, the earth-tones of the late 1970s, and the reappearance
of pastels in the 1980s. It is difficult to perceive building colour fashions in the 21st century,
perhaps because we are in the time, and affected by the fashions themselves, but also that
with societal change, we are less tempted to follow fashion, and that diversity reigns.
Although we might hope for the appearance of some insightful empirical research on building
exteriors that will allow a more evidence-based approach, this may never happen. William
Braham, of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests "At the outset, one must wonder if color
offers a wholly stable historical subject for examination", 21 implying that previous generations,
in particular the ancients, simply saw a more limited pallet of colours, and that modern
discussions of colour have increasingly related to the individual and the subjective. Perhaps
we are to be permanently left striving for a full explanation of how colour works on the minds
of people.
Yet in spite of the uncertainties, colour is one of the tools most readily available to the building
designer or manager to manipulate the effect of a building exterior. Moreover, it can be quite
an inexpensive implement. When we put together Golden Towne Manor in Meaford, Ontario,
the architect22 designed the exterior with simple bands of contrasting brick colours. Curious,
part-way through construction, I asked the contractor what this added to the cost of the
building - the response was that it added nothing... in fact the bricklayers themselves rather
liked doing something out of the ordinary. It only involved a bit more supervision - and the
foreman was there anyway. Quite apart from preferences and ornamentation, there is some
evidence that the use of colour can change the perception of space and form,23 at probably a
lower cost than physical manipulation of the space and form themselves.
Applied colour can be changed in keeping with changing trends, but still required careful
consideration of the ease (and cost) of implementing such change. For example, a
curtainwall manufacturer recently told me a scary story about the issues of changing the now-
unfashionable mullion colours on buildings a couple of decades old.
In the 21st century, new materials offer colour opportunities not available previously.
Dramatic and long-lived colours and patterns, are more feasible. Moreover, one might
21 Braham, (2001). p.194.
22 Seppo Kanerva of Sedun+Kanvera, Architects Inc., of Toronto.
23 Braham op.cit. (2001). p.195.
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suggest that there has been a decrease in societal conformity, perhaps allowing different
expressions of individuality.
Yet, the practical designer or manager might consider the remaining reasons why colour is
still not rampant on Canadian building exteriors. Building exteriors can be very long-lived -
longer than fashion trends, suggesting that transient building elements should be treated
differently than the permanent elements. Interiors can be redecorated relatively easily in
keeping with most recent trends, while exteriors may have to exist for decades or centuries
and not look excessively dated or weird, until they become esteemed simply for their age.
Some exterior elements that are periodically renewed might be considered for more
aggressive colours, especially those that are painted.
There are interesting current developments in techniques, such as projection mapping and
colour shifting dichroic glass, that might offer more complete colour flexibility in the near
future. Meanwhile, the increasing appearance of large electronic signage on building
exteriors can also give them colour, and the ability to change colour, at least until advertising
as a building feature becomes unfashionable again.
