Color: Outside the Lines

Faculty Thomas De Monchaux leads the workshop Color: Outside the Lines.

Why do architects wear black? Why are today’s renderings pastel pink and acid green? Modern architecture is characterized by a complex relationship to color on a spectrum of desire and disgust, approach and avoidance. This presentation considers certain critical readings of color in design discourse: dating to the systematic color theories, art histories, and influential archeological discoveries of the 19th century; through certain material, industrial, and technological histories of color behind the famously false neutrality of white walls in early modernism; to constructions and structures of color in constructions and structures of gender, race, class, and more. A brief prehistory of the composition and computation of color in today’s representational tools, from CMYK to RGB, will suggest greater resistance to default settings in our technical workspace, as part of necessary critical thinking about literal and figurative constructions of whiteness and blackness, and everything in between.

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Summer workshops and programs are open to the GSAPP Community. Students and faculty can access a direct link to this program in the most recent GSAPP Newsletter or by contacting the GSAPP Events Office. A recording of the event will be posted on this page following this event.