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

This title was first published in 2002: ‘This really is a text that will fill a long-felt want. I am sure it will be required reading for anyone interested in the art of the twentieth century.’ Joseph Rykwert Do colors have different spatial and architectural effects? What is the psychological impact of color? Are colors endowed with symbolic meaning? What is a natural color? Those 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 this century founded a school in London where he conducted experiments and wrote about color in architecture. Those experiments have been reconstructed for the book, which also includes reprints of his most important articles on the subject. This book provides a fascinating survey of this most contemporary topic that will inspire and inform designers and architects. Color 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 color of recent times, and especially within Modernism. This pioneering book is a thorough survey of the history and genesis of the most crucial questions concerning the role of architectural color from the nineteenth century to the present day.