Le Corbusier- Professional Practice

"Le Corbusier's essay on colour was part of his attempt to return it to architecture after it had been purged by a reaction against 'bourgeois taste' in the '20s (in which he was himself greatly involved). He wanted to find (or at least offer because, for once, he does admit to subjectivity) a system of standard architectural colours which were 'blue, in 3 or 4 values; red or pink; pale or dark green; yellow of ochres or of the earth', and of course white.(4) These, he said, could be found as the colours of buildings in all civilizations and folklore and, indeed, they are very similar to the colours for which Vitruvius gives elaborate recipes.(5) This is not entirely surprising, as Le Corbusier selected his tints from ranges commonly available from colourmen who had been making their pigments in roughly the same way since the times of the ancients. As Arthur Ruegg points out in his introduction to Le Corbusier's essay, the technology of colours changed radically after the Second World War, and 'the relationship with the "natural" pigments once used everywhere was thus lost; a multitude of different color cards took their place'.(6) Perhaps the very wideness of choice is one reason for our contemporary fear of colour.

In the pre-War period, Le Corbusier used colour to emphasize the nature of walls as planes emphasizing, or sometimes subverting,(7) the spatial and formal qualities of space and form. For instance, he believed (with countless others before and since) that colour modifies our appreciation of space: that 'Blue and its green combinations creates space ... distances the wall ... removes its quality of solidity ... Red (and its brown, orange etc ... combinations) fixes the wall, affirms its exact position, its presence'.(8) Further, colours have psychological and even physiological effects: 'to blue are attached subjective sensations, of softness, calm, of waterlandscape, sea or sky. To red are attached sensations of force, of violence. Blue acts on the body as a calmative, red as a stimulant.'(9)

After the War, Le Corbusier altered his approach to colour, retaining his previous architectural palette but adding to it and making colour symbolic and didactic: using it to describe for instance the traces regulateurs of the elevation of the pilgrimage house at Ronchamp.(10) This was a return to an attitude common among the non-whiteists of the early '20s, for instance de Still and the Berlin School in which Bruno Taut believed that it was a social duty of the architect to offer the inhabitants of social housing schemes 'an identification with their relatively modest living environment through the use of colour'.(11)

Colour as enhancer and modifier of space and form, colour as symbol, colour as generator of mood: it is again time to struggle to understand the wonderful complexities of colour. Our perceptions being an extraordinary combination of the Newtonian optics and the physiological and psychological perceptions investigated by Goethe and Le Corbusier, colour is elusive, not subjectable to any kind of rational system in its application. But as Fernand Leger emphasized, 'Man has need of colour for life: it is as necessary as water and fire'.(12) P. D."

12 'L'homme a besoin de couleurs pour vivre, c'est un element aussi necessaire que l'eau et la feu'. Quoted by Le Corbusier up cit, p. 140. My translation. P.D.

From: The Architectural Review | Date: 11/1/1998 | Author: Davey, Peter



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