Wednesday 8 October 2014

Pink Shirts & Pugin

^‘A little yellow drawing‐room’ painting by W.B.E.. Ranken from Basil Ionides, Colour and Interior Decoration, 1926

Exclusively for Saturated Space, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, author of "Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture", writes about colour as an architectural weapon in the domestic environment.

"One doesn’t tend to think of interior designers as being natural terrorists, but in common with artists of other kinds they can deploy colours as if they were weapons, and they have a rich arsenal of materials with which to do it. A fully designed modern interior will plant colours into the house at different scales with different textures, in order to inflict a sequence of unavoidable colour combinations on the residents.

Architects should learn from this. Architecture is, so we think, a bigger thing than interior design, mainly because its elements are meant to be there for ever. This paper described how colour in architecture can be and has been deployed as a weapon against the unsuspecting."