natural antagonism: notes on colour or architecture mark pimlott

NATURAL ANTAGONISM: NOTES ON
COLOUR OR ARCHITECTURE MARK PIMLOTT
Until the onset of Modernism in the visual arts and architecture in the
second decade of the twentieth century, the relationship between art
and architecture was complementary. Art, whether sculpture or
painting, was integrated within architecture’s fabric, enlisted to
reinforce and illuminate its constructions’ imagery, allusions and
nascent narratives. One’s idea of the happy co-existence between art
and architecture comes largely from the Renaissance, where their
integration seems to maintain the integrity of each. Although one is
familiar with the exuberance of art within Egyptian, Roman, Islamic,
Gothic, or Romanesque architecture, one is left with the impression that
either their structures have been subsumed in pictorial motifs, or that
these motifs have filled the spaces left between the architecture’s
structural components. Regardless of how compelling the themes of the
art, they are superimposed on the architectural support. In the case of
Renaissance examples, a different relation is evident. Renaissance
painting extended the spatial fictions of representational architecture,
both in its constructions and its subject matter, while retaining its own
space. Painting, sculpture and architecture were not exclusive practices:
each supported the function and reading of the other. Indeed, the
protagonists of this period frequently engaged in all three of the artistic
disciplines, representing a totalising view that may be have been initiated
by Filippo Brunelleschi’s development of perspective projection,1 which
defined parameters for painting and architecture alike, and provided a
foundation for their partnership in depicting and constructing an ideal
world through realistic re-presentation.
However, the advent of Modernism precipitated differing and distinct
ambitions for relations between architecture and art, and in particular
between architecture and painting. Until then, a complementary and
meaningful relationship between art and architecture was actively
pursued, in which architecture assumed the role of framework for the
functional and representational schema that painting and sculpture
would complement and amplify. This was the case throughout the
nineteenth century, responding to all the upheavals one associates with
modernity. The relationship held fast through the making of the first
architecture one identifies as Modern (Art Nouveau), and the first
architecture one associates with Modernism (Expressionist), and was
ultimately fuelled by a shared desire for the radical and utopian trans­
formation of society.2 The necessity of finding a way to relate art and
architecture was inscribed in the objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund,
the Wiener Werkstätte and the curriculum of the Bauhaus. That relationship
came to an end. The rupture that ensued between art and architecture,
especially as represented by colour, is central to this essay.
Functionalism was a very particular strain within Modernist
architecture that at once acknowledged the relentless development
of technology and was representative of a wider tendency to strictly
1
Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
define various activities in terms of specialisations: an atomising,
paradoxical counterpoint to universal suffrage that led to the profession­
alisation of disciplines and the pursuit and defence of their autonomy.
Modernist architecture’s shunning of traditional arrangements, appearances
and functions in favour of ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ means and appearances
was a distinct and conscious departure from the representational,
allegorical character of its past and its sympathies with ‘dreamy’ pursuits.3
The new architecture concerned itself with the tasks specific to an
industrialised society in the process of radical trans­formation. Func­
tionalism was the endgame of architecture’s autonomy: it would
disappear as an artistic field and, instead, serve. Painting, for its part,
pursued its own continuing enquiries into representation, perception,
spatiality and time towards abstraction (another kind of objectivity).
Painting was in a completely new and isolated position, achieving an
autonomy which it would not relinquish for many years. The different
paths toward autonomy for art and architecture set them at odds with
each other, despite their putative spatial or political sympathies. Art
and architecture learned to co-exist as distinct fields of activity within
a utopian social or operative idea.
De Stijl
As complementary as the painting of the Renaissance may have been
to its architecture, the painting and colour of Modernism can be seen as
other to architecture, and by extension to the architecture of Modernism.
Among the first artists to enjoy the autonomy of painting, and the first
fruits of artist/architect collaborations on the new terms that existed
between the two disciplines, were Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der
Leck of the De Stijl movement. It became clear that the status of art as
support for architecture was inadequate to their ambitions. Van der Leck
declared that he wanted painting (and colour) to be given the opportunity
to ‘destroy’ or ‘deconstruct’ architecture; van Doesburg wanted art and
colour to either ‘replace’ architecture, or assume an even greater role by
making architecture’s invisible characteristics visible. 4 Van Doesburg
continually developed thoughts about these possibilities: in Tot een
Beeldende Architectuur (1924) he saw colour as architecture’s ‘organic
means of expression’, which would make its spatial relationships visible.
He wrote earlier that painting (in this case solid colour) in conjunction
with architecture would create a condition in which the viewer/occupant
would be able to enter the painting; earlier still, van Doesburg and van
der Leck had recognised the inevitable autonomy of the disciplines and
practices of art and architecture, and so advocated uses of colour
liberated from obligations to traditional spatial confines, those that could
be used to ‘destroy’ architecture. Van Doesburg’s desire to replace the
spatiality of architecture with the spatiality of art was fulfilled in the
Café Aubette in Strasbourg (1926 – 28). In the Petite Salle-Dancing, the
architecture was subservient to the arrangement of inset panels of
2
Fig. 1
Theo van Doesburg
Café Aubette in Strasbourg,
Ciné-Dancing 1926 – 1928
Photo © Pierre Filliquet,
Christophe Urbain.
From Emmanuel Guigon,
Hans van der Werf and
Mariet Willinge (eds.), De
Aubette of de kleur in de
architectuur (Rotterdam:
Uitgeverij 010, 2006)
colour and light; while in the Ciné-Dancing, the diagonally-oriented
relief-planes of colour overwhelmed the architectural container.
This ‘destructive’ motif had been preceded by van Doesburg’s own
scheme for a gentleman’s apartment from 1920; by Vilmos Huszár and
Gerrit Rietveld’s scheme for an exhibition room, published in 1923; and
was paralleled by Piet Mondrian’s interior for Ida Bienert (1926), all of
which were characterised by the replacement of orthogonal architectural
space with colour, distributed in all-over compositions of rectangles that
ignored the differences between walls and ceilings, and even floors.
Most effectively represented at the time in the Proun works by El Lissitzky,
this type of space transcended the traditional limitations imposed by
conventional architecture. It dematerialised architecture without resorting
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Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
to formlessness. Gerrit Rietveld wanted to employ colour not as painting,
but within a concrete entity that fused colour and architecture.5
These artist-originated avenues represented an approach fund­
amentally at odds with the functionalist direction proposed by the
majority of Modernist architects. That direction was propounded
internationally by the proceedings of CIAM (Congrès International
d’Architecture Moderne),6 beginning in 1928, which advocated rational
and radical approaches to the problem of the city and its organisation.
CIAM was largely a group of ‘white’ architects (for the colour of their
buildings) making work in European and colonial African cities, dominated
by the rhetoric and personality of Le Corbusier.
In autonomous architecture, whither art?
For decades, while CIAM dominated architectural culture, art’s place
in architecture was fixed: contrary to the view of De Stijl artists, art’s
work was to serve as a counterpoint to architecture within its precise,
predetermined framework.7 Artists and architects maintained their
autonomy, in practice, material and frames of reference, to the point of
orthodoxy. The architects had CIAM, which was influential right through
the 1950s; art had its theorists too. Clement Greenberg, in his essay
‘Towards a newer laocoon’ (1940), argued for painting’s autonomy:
its distinctness from pictorialism or other artistic forms so that it may
be only what it was, leading it increasingly towards non-referential
abstraction. Given such strictures, it seemed unlikely that avant-garde
art and architecture would have anything to say to each other ever again.
The practices were distinct, and could be characterised as hostile to
each other.8
When they did meet, it was frequently under the arrangement
in which art played a supporting, servile role, a continuation of the
characterisations of the Bauhaus and CIAM. An increasingly abstract
art fitted a functionalist, technocratic architecture, and found itself
subsumed into an overall project of ‘design’. The Hochschule für
Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, founded after the war as an institution for
a new society, positioned art as a form of communication, useful to
graphic, typographic and industrial design.9 The HfG’s most celebrated
protagonist, Max Bill, was typographer, industrial designer, architect,
painter and sculptor all rolled into one:10 yet his output suggested that
all of these activities were distinct outlets of one consistent project,
the design of ‘good’ goods for a democratic society. Within the
politicised, functionalist context of the HfG Ulm, art was neutralised.
A special case: Mies van der Rohe
While the Bauhaus and HfG Ulm offered a relationship between art and
architecture in which the former was either subservient to or subsumed
within the strictures of design, the De Stijl strategy of disruption or
4
dematerialisation was taken up by the architect Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe. Mies, on familiar terms with the main protagonists of Modernist
architecture,11 used painting and sculpture for their capacity to orches­
trate or extend the spaces he made both within and beyond his buildings.
In his presentation perspectives made for houses, paintings (often those
of Klee or Schwitters) feature as architectural elements in their own
right, as pictorial surfaces spanning from floor to ceiling; sculptures
(often those of Kolbe or Maillol) serve as focus points within views
towards the horizon defined by the planes of floor and ceiling, defining
one’s understanding of the interior as continuous with a carefully
demarcated exterior.12 Because these works tended to include their
settings, albeit in a very precise manner, the anti-structural character
of the paintings and sculptures tended to contribute to, rather than
destroy, the spatial character of the building proposals. Art was useful,
yet whether – as in the Renaissance – it had its own space or not, is
contestible. When Mies designed a building for art, the position of painting,
at least, was problematic. At both the Houston Museum of Fine Arts
(1954 – 58) and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1962 – 68), the
paintings were suspended from the ceiling on panels or on their own,
hovering between the symmetrically-opposed floor and ceiling planes.
Although the early curators in Houston were excited by this arrange­
ment, it was ultimately regarded as unsatisfying for the buildings and
the art they displayed. In the case of the main representative floor of
the Neue Nationalgalerie, it remains very difficult to display art there.
Its architecture is dominant, and there is no home for art, even for
the autonomous painting of late Modernism, save as counterpoint.
Art’s movement towards the problem of architecture
It was art’s susceptibility to external influences that brought its own
fantasy of autonomy to an end. Pop Art accepted and celebrated the
commonplace imagery of consumer culture and the street, and invited
confusion with it.13 Arte Povera followed suit, in its opening of itself to
the world it shared with other things. The blurring of boundaries that
ensued forever dispelled the notion of art’s purity in relation to other
activities, disciplines, artefacts or forms of production. The distinction
between categories of art, such as painting and sculpture, was similarly
no longer useful, and a new kind of art began to appear in the late 1960s
which was indifferent to such distinctions: works assumed the forms
that were necessary for them ‘to work’, even if this meant that they
should have no form at all. The dematerialisation of the art object echoed,
in highly diverse artistic practices,14 the spatial dissolution proposed by
elements of the avant-garde in the 1920s.
Art was led once more to architecture through the necessity of
considering the scenes of its varied presences. Conceptual art’s address
of worldly issues could take on any guise; its inquiry into the very nature
of the work of art led to questions concerning its very constitution. This
5
Painting with Architecture in Mind
inquiry extended to the context of viewing – the site of art’s visibility
– and its role in forming, by suggestion or imposition, through its
significations and its situation in society as a whole, the viewer’s
experience and position. Consequently, questions regarding the qualities,
expressions and prescriptions of the physical container of art inevitably
turned to the architecture of the modern world, its institutions and art
spaces in particular.15 Direct criticism of architecture’s power came from
so-called ‘post-conceptual’ artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan
Graham, whose illustrations of architecture as the locus of power and
power relations had a profound impact on the future of relations and
collaborations between artists and architects. The writing of Michel
Foucault, whose emergence was coincident with the appearance of
these works, seemed to mark architecture, particularly that of the
institution, as the repository of a patrimony of domination that it was
necessary to assess and confront continuously through critical and /or
antipathetic practices. As such, Foucault’s arguments served to further
substantiate the perceived task of contemporary art to fulfil a critical
role in relation to institutions of all kinds and their assumed forms.16
Correspondingly, as architects came to recognise the collapse
of the authority of their discipline throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
effected by social and economic crises and persistent criticism, a selfawareness finally emerged that led to wider considerations about what
architecture could be or connect to.
In parallel to the erosion of boundaries of architectural considerations,
the strategies of conceptual and post-conceptual art provided templates
for contemporary artistic practice that allowed artists to address context
and architecture in the making and positioning of their work. This has
led to, among other things, new possibilities for relations between artists
and architects, including collaborative work. The residue of a continuing
antagonism sustains the idea that something special, and not necessarily
complementary, might come of these collaborative efforts. Artists and
architects see themselves as different from one another, regardless of
the interest that each may have in the other’s field. Attempts at one-off
syntheses of the disciplines have been entertained and pursued vigorously
for only twenty years or so, with quite different outcomes.17
By the end of the 1980s, a multi-faceted, critical and omniscient
artist was pre-eminent; the artist was granted, by an expanding number
of public and private institutions dedicated to contemporary art
(particularly in western Europe), a wider range of activity in the public
realm.18 The result was a new kind of public art, and a change in the
framing of the public art commission, wherein art was required to
become publicly accountable and ‘functional’. Despite the pressures
that such commissions exert upon artists and architects to reach
a supportive relationship, the artist’s work remains in some sort
of antagonistic relationship with that of the architect: it has different
concerns, objectives, and is formed with an obligation to criticality,
particularly in relation to architecture’s role in the articulation of
power relations.19
6
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
What is germane to art – narrative, allegory, allusion, illusion,
representation, experimental materiality, craft, authorial individualism,
colour – is not germane to either Modernist or contemporary architecture.
Of all of these traits, colour is potentially the most disruptive to arch­
itecture as it is the least predictable: one recalls the efforts within
De Stijl in the 1920s to use colour as a tool to destroy architecture.
In architecture, colour is accorded singularity. Colour may manifest itself
in a variety of guises: it may decorate or inform architecture; it may be
integrated with architecture or interfere with it. In the artist’s hands,
colour may assert its status as painting and replace architecture;
conversely, it may assume the position of architecture itself.
Architects’ uses of colour in contemporary architecture
The increasing autonomy of the disciplines of art and architecture
as a consequence of developments within Modernism led to their
divergence. For architecture, colour was a casualty of this divergence.
Modernist architecture consciously eschewed colour’s use, adopting
white surfaces as indices of its functionalist, operative nature. Colour,
if present at all, was relegated to the interior, where it could play a
relatively traditional role in private scenes.20 Contemporary architecture
typically continues to labour under the yoke of Modernist morality in
relation to colour. When colour re-entered architecture, as it did with
some impact in the 1960s under the influence of Pop Art, it was consigned
to an indexical role, tightly controlled, largely used to illustrate some
conceit of function. Colour was an embraced irritant: it repres­ented
‘the street’ and popular culture, or their reflections in Pop Art. Colour
was asked to assume a playful role in architecture that aspired to the
condition of an event or a structure that did everything. This may be
seen in the hypothetical projects of Archigram; the Centre Georges
Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers (1978) and the infra­
structure for the Olympiapark in Munich by Hans Hollein (1972) which
was inspired by them; and in further offspring such as James Stirling’s
Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1983) and Clore extension to the Tate
Gallery (1984) in London. A residue of this Pop treatment is seen in
Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1983), with its evenly distributed
array of neo-Constructivist pavilions, in which one colour – red –
appears at once as an auratic figure, a sign for play and for political
emancipation, and a filter that unifies the architectural schema (in
tandem with a set of thematic pathways) across its huge site. In still
more recent architecture, colour has been exploited for its ability to
animate surfaces, as is seen in the buildings of Sauerbruch Hutton21
whose claddings, designed as accumulations of colour fragments, dazzle
viewer and context alike. Their colour articulates the architecture and
is at odds with it, rendering the buildings exceptional figures in the urban
fabric. Buildings such as the Federal Environment Agency in Dessau
(2005) and the Brandhorst Museum in Munich (2008) stand out as being
at once present as colour and absent as architecture. The colours excite
7
Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
the viewer’s perception of their architecture’s ‘information’ with a
shimmering decorative effect that makes the architecture, its context
and its meaning effectively disappear.
There have been exceptions to these kinds of uses of colour by
architects working in the Modernist tradition, who have, conversely,
used colour to make their buildings appear: Luis Barragán, Carlo Scarpa,
and John Hejduk22 all used colour in order to reveal their ideas, assum­
ing an aura that intensifies the viewer’s attention to the matter of
architecture, from whose substance colour is impossible to separate.
This approach is particularly significant, as can be seen in the relations
that some contemporary artists propose between colour and arch­
itecture, whose work I will discuss shortly.
Colour into architecture
De Stijl artists’ use of colour in architecture separated colour from
architecture, highlighting its alternative spatial and emotional prog­
ramme. As true now as it was for the artists of the 1920s, arch­itecture
controls by its very nature;23 colour cannot be controlled. In its varied
aspects of unpredictability, illusion, infantilism and impurity, its
associations with emotional or psychological states,24 colour has
the capacity to destabilise architecture’s concreteness, as well as its
fictions; to dissolve architecture; to render architecture ‘a picture
of itself’. The artist’s introduction of colour endangers architecture’s
integrity and pretence of authenticity. Architecture is accustomed
to being conceptually, if not literally, white; colour’s colour – precisely
because of its possible associations – can overwhelm architecture’s
claims upon truth. Colour’s insubstantiality is anathema to the very
substance of architecture, and thereby demystifies it, supplants it,
replaces it with its unknowable essence.25 White also dominates the
settings for contemporary art, commanding its interiors, cancelling
quotidian effects and architecture. Colour absents itself in order to
promote attention. Colour’s absence becomes the index of a tabula rasa
condition, a cancellation of attendant, polluting effects.26 White is a
register of austerity and denial, and so it is on this whiteness that colour
appears in the gallery and the museum as a difficult entity. Similarly,
when projected onto architecture, artists’ focused uses of colour
disrupt architecture’s intended integrity, clarity and order.
It is instructive to look at a few emblematic works that are repres­
entative of differing strategies regarding colour and architecture. To do
this, I wish to discuss briefly some works of Dan Flavin and Blinky
Palermo; and collaborations with architects by Michael Craig-Martin,
Helmut Federle and Rémy Zaugg.
The installations of the artist Dan Flavin are only temporarily
incorporated into works of architecture. The works and their spaces
appear when the electricity is switched on. In the case of those works
whose sources (fluorescent tubes) are visible, the geometry and
8
measure of the objects overwhelm the architectural container with
their insistent, auratic light and colour. The architecture of the host
rooms and their surfaces collect and articulate the components of that
light. Ultimately, what appears is colour, and the figure or arrangement
of light as it falls on the architecture, transforming it. In its being
rendered visible through Flavin’s coloured light, architecture is also
destroyed, or dissolved, replaced by something that, to some extent,
bears its image: a ghostly figure whose forms are uncertain. With the
dematerialised work of art comes the blasting apart of its context,
which is true whether the electricity is switched on or off.
In the case of Blinky Palermo, colour has its own status as an entity
or being that asserts its presence in the midst of architecture. At times,
this presence is almost imperceptible. In other instances, architecture
is revealed, or that which architecture habitually conceals is revealed.
An installation of two vertical panels painted white, adjacent to the door
frame of a white painted art gallery, seems to lend that opening and its
elements a totemic aura, while disturbing its order; the painting of the
space under a staircase handrail in grey makes it a legitimate, if benighted
space; the painting of a section of stair in an adjacent space concealed
behind a wall makes the simultaneity of things, normally unseen in
architecture, abundantly present, rather than plainly visible. And in
further instances still, colour imposes itself as an entity that is fused
with architecture, which through its force creates a new agent that
is painting, colour and architecture all at once, and yet none of them:
it is something other. A maze of walls in a museum intended for pictures
is painted a dark, earthen red, with a plan of the arrangement painted as
a drawing on one of its faces: the wall becomes a painting /colour
architecture /construction, believable at once as all those things and
plainly none of them. This new creation suggests a supercharged
architecture, in which manifestations of colour cannot be detached from
their support; and its support – architecture – cannot exist without that
which renders it visible: colour.
Artists, architects and colour: examples, exemplar
For artists to project their work onto architecture as it is made, there
must be architects willing to accommodate it. Unsurprisingly, there are
relatively few architects who embrace such collaborations and their
potential for disruption, although there is a growing culture of such
temporary partnerships. Among the architects who do so with some
enthusiasm are Adolf Krischanitz, who has worked with Helmut Federle;
and Herzog and de Meuron, who have worked with Michael Craig-Martin
and Rémy Zaugg as well as Federle, Joseph Beuys, Thomas Ruff and
Adrian Schiess. In relations between artists and architects, one must
confront the autonomy of each practice. Will the artist make architecture?
Will the architect make art? Does something new and specific emerge
from their joint efforts?
9
Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
Fig. 3
Helmut Federle and
Adolf Krischanitz,
Neue Welt Schule, Wien,
1994
Photo © Margherita
Spiluttini. From Helmut
Federle and Adolf
Krischanitz, Neue Welt
Schule (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz, 1994)
Fig. 2
Michael Craig-Martin and
Herzog & de Meuron.
Laban Centre for Dance,
London, 2002
Courtesy of
Gagosian Gallery, London
Photo ©
Margherita Spiluttini
10
In works by Michael Craig-Martin, architecture serves as support
for colour which, though fused to it, overwhelms it. Craig-Martin, who
has collaborated with Herzog and de Meuron, paints walls from floor to
ceiling in intense colours that serve as supports for line drawings taken
from a finite catalogue of ubiquitous objects. These objects, projected at
varying scales and in varying relationships, often have some connection,
in use or association, to the actual uses of the received space. The
coloured walls (painted in the manner of a house-painter) become
pictorial colour-fields that contain represented objects that are to be
taken as actual objects. In this representational arrangement the substance
of architecture disappears, again. Spatiality is disturbed and rendered
insubstantial; and the real becomes a matter of belief.27
At the Laban Centre for Dance, Deptford, east London (2002),
Craig-Martin painted the broad corridors in brash turquoise, pink and
green, which serve as colour fields for the commonplace (and real)
equipment of the building, such as doors and lockers. The colour leaks
out through the building’s translucent polycarbonate façades, and
saturates its public spaces. It also transforms the building’s various
fittings and equipment into pictures of themselves, lending the whole
building a rather fictional quality.
In the work made in collaboration with the architect Adolf Krischanitz
by the painter Helmut Federle, the artist visits colour upon those
architectural features of the Neue Welt Schule in Vienna (1994) that he
takes to be sympathetic supports. Walls and window frames to classrooms
are painted in single flat tones of impure colour, which offset the dominant
materials of the building’s construction: concrete walls and ceilings,
rubber and oak parquet flooring.28 These painted elements appear as
‘architectural’ versions of Federle’s abstract paintings, while remaining
distinctly architectural elements. The result, a coating for the secondary
architectural elements that carries the artist’s gesture, seems to suit
both parties: neither has disrupted the other’s activity. Krischanitz’s
architecture is reinforced by Federle’s painting of the secondary
elements, which assume an appearance – a visibility – that makes the
building and its order legible. The work serves a didactic role, disappearing
into the architecture, yet its strident colour does not allow it to disappear:
it appears. When art is led down the path of fulfilling or representing a
11
Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
would be achieved through other means, namely through words painted
on the colour’s surface (in specific, complementary colours) that seemed
to enable the blue to express itself as a conscious being, a being that
was the painting, that was colour: ‘Ich, das Bild, ich fühle’ (I, the painting,
I feel); or, as though the words that spoke of themselves were beings:
‘Stell dir vor/wir die Wörter/wir schliessen/die Augen/und du mensch/
du kannst dir/nichts mehr/vorstellen’ (Imagine/we the words/we close/
our eyes/and you, man/you cannot imagine anything anymore). The
colour both disappears and speaks of itself, appearing as a complex
other in the imaginations of users of the building. This is the correct
appearance for art: a meeting with the viewer. To understand an
exemplary enactment of such a meeting of colour and art with architecture,
I turn to the words of Zaugg:
Rémy Zaugg and
Herzog & de Meuron,
Roche, Basel, 2000
Photo © Margherita
Spiluttini. From Rémy
Zaugg, Architecture by
Herzog & de Meuron, Wall
painting by Rémy Zaugg, a
Work for Roche Basel
(Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001)
12
function, does it cease to be art? Does it become decoration, or publicity,
or is it simply integral with the architecture? Is this a desirable condition?
The reinforcement of architecture by colour – in which colour
is integrated into architecture, reinforcing its themes while maintaining
its own status as colour – is a condition that one expects to be as
uncomplicated as it seems to be conventional. There are, however,
subtle distinctions to be made between those strategies and works in
which the incursion of colour remains as the placement of art within
architecture, and those in which colour disappears into architecture,
and both art and artist disappear entirely. In the meetings of contemp­
orary art and architecture, this approach is extremely rare. It may be
an exemplary approach.
Rémy Zaugg’s work with Herzog and de Meuron for a new building
for Roche pharmaceuticals in Basel (2000) aimed to find a place and
meaning for colour in which it would be unified with the architectural
schema in its entirety. Zaugg’s approach was ambitious. The specific
characters of art and architecture are maintained, yet the art disappears
into architecture only to re-‘appear’ in the imaginations of viewers and
occupants. A close study of the values and effects of colour led Zaugg to
the use of a particular hue and finish of blue, which covered a five-storey
high wall that separated one part of the building, containing offices and
laboratories, from its symbolic ‘head’, containing the lobby, auditorium,
exhibition space and a library that faced the street. The artist obliged the
colour to appear in a specific way, in which it would seem inextricable
from the architectural composition; and so it would disappear as a work
of art in the conventional sense. Its ‘appearance’ as colour and as art
Once finished, the work of the painter will give the impression that
it was desired, called for and willed by the architecture, which,
without the art, could not have become what it had to be and would
have remained incomplete. It is on this one condition that the work
of the artist is legitimate, justified and meaningful. If the artist
succeeds, it will seem as if he has done nothing, his work having
been willed and dictated by the architecture itself. The artist will
disappear behind the manifest necessity of the work.29
Conclusion
Art is different from architecture, and artists are different from architects.
They have different priorities, different ambitions and different things to
say. When artists are involved with architects and architecture in building,
architecture is changed. The inferred antagonism between artist and
architects is one of the effects of Modernism, wherein the practice of
each has found itself pushed towards an autonomous position, consistent
with the historical development of specialisation and professionalism.
This autonomy has preconditioned the stance that contemporary artists
have taken towards architecture, which has been further informed by
those branches of theoretical and critical writing that have singled out
architecture’s capacity to embody and represent power relations. Of all
the acts that an artist might visit upon architecture, it appears that the
deployment of colour – innocuous as it first might seem – is potentially
the most incisive means of affecting the architectural object. This is at
once because of colour’s own associative properties relating to emotional
and psychological states and architecture’s long-standing conceptual
banishment of colour in pursuit of operational and representational purity.
The suggestive yet indefinite potential of colour is therefore fundamentally
at odds with architecture. However, we have seen that this opposition
comes in many shades, the most fascinating of which is that which
reinforces architecture or reveals its innate yet hidden characteristics.
The potential of colour in architecture, as apparently recognised by Theo
13
Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
van Doesburg, of either destroying architecture or achieving it, has been
realised in its full spectrum by those contemporary artists following the
legacy of Conceptual Art. There are artists who destroy, distort, or extend
architecture; and artists who disappear into architecture. It is this last
group, conspicuously few in number, who seem to offer something at once
specific and special to the meeting of colour and architecture: a fragment
of thought that fuses colour and architecture in a single, unified entity
that returns the gaze of the viewer. Such an encounter, like all those with
an other, bears unknowable consequences.
This essay, presented to the colloquium Painting with Architecture in Mind in June
2009, was published in a modified form under the title of Colour or architecture, in
Susanne Komossa, Kees Rouw, Joost Hillen, eds. Kleur in hedendaagse architectuur/
Colour in contemporary architecture (SUN uitgeverij: Nijmegen, 2009).
Endnotes
1
Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
2Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).
3Walter Gropius characterised much of the work of Bauhaus in this way before he
re-oriented its programme towards a unity between art and technology in 1923.
4Paul Overy, De Stijl (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991). In a work made for a
housing estate in Drachten, Friesland by Cornelis de Boer in 1921, van Doesburg
painted architectural elements such as doors, windows and their frames, in
bright primary colours (and the doors and windows of a primary school in
secondary colours) which rendered those elements very visible, thereby
agitating the relatively conventional architectural constructions. The painted
elements remained nevertheless decorative, subservient to the architectural
scheme. Similarly, the stained glass windows and tiled floors that Theo van
Doesburg designed for the De Vonk vacation hostel in Noordwijkerhout by Oud
(1917), served a decorative role.
5Ibid.
6For extended descriptions of CIAM, one can turn to many sources. See Siegfried
Giedion, Space, Time & Architecture (New York: Harvard University Press, 1949).
For a critical overview of CIAM and the rhetoric of Le Corbusier, see Manfredo
Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, Volumes 1 and 2 (Milan:
Electa, 1976); English edition, (London: Academy Editions, 1980); paperback
edition, (London: Faber & Faber, 1984).
7Examples include the artworks incorporated into the United Nations buildings;
the Henri Matisse mural of La Danse painted for Sergei Shchukin’s Trubetskoy
Palace in Moscow; the dome of the Garnier Opéra, painted by Marc Chagall;
Picasso’s Guernica as positioned in J L Sert’s Spanish pavilion for the 1937
Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne;
and the murals, stained-glass windows and enamelled panels of Le Corbusier
for his own buildings.
8Mark Rothko’s offence at the destination of his commissioned painting cycle, above
14
diners (‘the bastards’) at the Philip Johnson-designed Four Seasons restaurant in
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, is indicative of the gulf that such an
approach to practice had opened between the disciplines. Some of the paintings
are now enshrined in the ‘Rothko Room’ at Tate Modern in London, interpreted by
many of its audience as a chapel dedicated to sublime abstraction.
9René Spitz, hfg ulm: The View behind the Foreground. The Political History
of the Ulm School of Design 1953-1968 (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2002).
10Thomas Buchsteiner, Otto Letze, Daniela Ginten, Heike Frommer and Stephanie
Maute (eds), Max Bill: maler, bildhauer, architekt, designer (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje
Cantz, 2005).
11Mies was made director of the Bauhaus, following the Neue Sachlichkeit architect
Hannes Meyer’s dismissal, in 1930. Mies ‘de-politicised’ the school and moved
it to Berlin to ensure its survival for a short time. He attended CIAM’s early
conferences, and counted himself among the members of the avant-garde. See
Barry Bergdoll (ed.), Mies in Berlin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001).
12Penelope Curtis, Patio and Pavilion (London/Los Angeles: Ridinghouse/J. Paul
Getty Museum, 2008).
13Andy Warhol’s shop windows for the Bonwit Teller department store (1957)
featured paintings derived from popular images drawn from comics placed
in a ‘vulgar’ commodity context, and so displaced from the ideologically
validated commodity spaces of art galleries; and Claes Oldenburg’s The Store
(1961) occupied a shop unit, displaying painted constructions that represented
what one might buy in a regular shop, or store, ranging from cakes to trousers.
14Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
15So-called ‘Minimal’ artists, such as Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and
Donald Judd, made art that, among its other characteristics, effected a profound
impact on the appreciation of the space or context of the work of art in relation to
the work of art itself. Conceptual artists, such as Michael Asher, made work that
exposed the physical or economic workings of art institutions through the judicious
addition or subtraction of frequently architectural elements. ‘Post-conceptual’
artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham attacked the cleared ground
with devices that made the various effects of this corporate world visible. See
Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972.
16This role maintained its status through the rise and demise of the
Neo-expressionist and Transvanguardia movements in painting in the 1980s,
and emerged, reinvigorated, in the continuing work of the first generation of
conceptual artists and the so-called neo-conceptual artists who were inspired
(and taught) by them. The new generation, in observing the practices of the first,
were more likely to assume a variety of approaches and identities, with a flexibility
and mutability characteristic of the intellectual, eclectic, instinctive and fragmentary
work of Marcel Duchamp, who continued to make work until the mid-1960s. See
Jean-Christophe Bailly, Duchamp (London: Art Data, 1986). Models were also
provided by, for example, the strategic critical approach of Michael Asher in
Michael Asher and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Writings 1973 – 1983 on works
1969–1979 / Michael Asher (Halifax, NS: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
1984); the sardonic, politicised documents of Martha Rosler; or the situation-
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Painting with Architecture in Mind
Natural Antagonism: Notes on Colour or Architecture
related responses, at once specific and open, of Lawrence Weiner (‘1. The artist
may construct the work; 2. The work may be fabricated; 3. The work need not to
be built.’) Lawrence Weiner (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1983).
17The idea of architect-artist collaborations is commonplace now, but it was not
always so. The first bodies formed in Britain to enable inter-disciplinary projects
were the Public Art Development Trust, established in London in 1983; and the
Public Art Commissions Agency, in Birmingham in 1987.
18The great demonstrations of the expanded field for the work of the artist
(and not necessarily the work of art) were special, international convocations.
Exhibitions such as Chambres d’amis in Ghent (1986), held in private homes,
curated by Jan Hoet; Documenta in Kassel, beginning in 1955 curated by Arnold
Bode and held every five years since 1972, curated first by Harald Szeemann and
then by different curators (including Jan Hoet in 1997) for each subsequent event;
and Skulptur Münster, curated by Kasper Köning et al and held every ten years
since 1977, offered the city as a site laden with meaning that art could illuminate,
comment upon and change. They were models for the situations presented to
artists in art commissions in the 1990s and the beginning of this century.
19This can be seen in the work of artists Liam Gillick, Joep van Lieshout, Jorge
Pardo or Tobias Rehberger. See Jorge Pardo, ‘Interview with Fritz Haeg (1999)’
pp. 58 – 60; Tobias Rehberger, ‘Sleeping on a Van Gogh: Interview with Anthony
Spira (2005)’, pp. 136 –139; Liam Gillick, ‘Interview with Catsou Roberts and Lucy
Steeds, (2000)’ pp. 178 –185 in Alex Coles (ed.), Design and Art (Cambridge MA:
MIT Press/ Whitechapel, 2007).
20Le Corbusier, exceptionally, used colour in domestic and institutional interiors to
extend his own ambitions as an artist and reinforce the plasticity of the figures of
his plan libre. In the Huis Sonneveld, Leen van der Vlugt’s use of colour reflected
the bourgeois and liberal tendencies of the clients.
21Kurt Forster, Louisa Hutton, Matthias Sauerbruch and Mohsen Mostafavi,
WYSIWYG: Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (London: Architectural Association, 1999).
22Emilio Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1978); Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol, Carlo Scarpa:
Opera completa (Milan: Electa, 1984); Kim Shkapich (ed.), John Hejduk: The Mask
of Medusa (New York: Rizzoli, 1985).
23Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison)
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975); English paperback edition, (New York: Vintage, 1995).
24David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).
25Eric Maas and Delano Greenidge (eds), Blinky Palermo 1943 – 1977 (New York:
Delano Greenidge Editions, 1989).
26David Batchelor, Chromophobia. Mark Pimlott, Bande sonore (sound work, 1997):
in this piece, a narrator broadcasts a series of characterisations of white
rooms in the tradition of Modernism over speakers situated within an empty,
white-painted gallery (Todd Gallery, London).
27Mark Pimlott and Artur Zaguła, Michael Craig-Martin (Łódź: Stzuki Museum, 1994).
28Helmut Federle and Adolf Krischanitz, Neue Welt Schule (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje
Cantz, 1994).
29Rémy Zaugg, Architecture by Herzog & de Meuron, Wall painting by Rémy Zaugg,
a Work for Roche Basel (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001).
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