Entries tagged with “architecture” from Livelygrey

Oh my...
There we go again. I came across this page at dwell.com where Fred A. Bernstein says:

I’ve always been vaguely embarrassed by color, associating pastels with kitsch and primaries with kindergarten. I’m not even sure I agree with Meier, who claimed, in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech, that he likes white “because within it you can see all the colors of the rainbow.” I like white because within it I can’t see all the colors of the rainbow.

For your education, Fred, here’s a picture of a Richard Meier building. I measured some of the colors I found on the building in the picture and put them at the bottom. Incidentally: I didn’t spot any white. This is a picture with ‘normal’ lighting. Things can get really drastic when the lighting gets more dramatic. Below you’ll find an example, which I grabbed from Richard Meier’s website.

Here’s a question for you, Fred: Why does Richard Meier publish only color images of his work?
To choose a white or grey surface for a building is as much a color choice as any other. Look at the work of Le Corbusier. He used brightly painted surfaces alongside bare concrete. I somehow don’t think that was because he ran out of paint...

The White House in Washington is a Georgian style building. Georgian architects employed a decorative style derived from ancient Greece and Rome. Which explains the white painted surface, because it was generally assumed that the ancient Greek and Roman buildings were white. After all, when looking at pictures of the archetypical example of classical architecture, the Parthenon in Athens, it always looks white.

Only recently I visited the Parthenon for the first time. And probably similar to most architects in this world, I had always assumed that it is white.
Well....
It isn't.
The color of the Parthenon is more like ochre, which is not white by a long shot. I suppose most of the pictures of the Parthenon are shot so that they more or less represent our cliche image of it, instead of representing the actual situation. But as the saying goes: every picture is a lie. If indeed the design of the White House was derived from classical architecture, its color is simply plain wrong. But there's more to it.....
In fact the Parthenon, and all other major classical buildings, were originally painted in bright colors. I will delve deeper into this subject in future posts, but just trust me on this for the time being. This also means that the colors of neo-classical buildings such as the White House are based on a misconception. In fact it would probably be more historically accurate, not to mention more fun, to repaint the White House in pink. ;-)