Abstract:
Explored here is the sensorial capacity of colour. It considers how its sensory and emotive capacities may creatively bridge distance. The research asks, what if colour were thought a primary force rather than as something secondary applied? Take the Resene colour formation B41-039-249, otherwise named “Wanaka”. It is a tone of blue directing the experiencer towards a distant place while positing that place’s absence, and therefore, a longing or desire for it. This place-colour-longing project foregrounds New York City, a destination intended as a site of research, but one abruptly curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Set on exploring the spatial implications of Mark Rothko’s colour panels intended for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, the project aimed to consider the intersection of colour in modernist spaces, spaces themselves predicated on a certain excising of colour (Wigley, 1995). While Rothko’s planned contribution to encircle ground floor diners in a coloured atmosphere, the artist withdrew the work leaving it be later exhibited in the Tate Modern, London where it is known as the Seagram Murals. In turn, it is longing and proper place-belonging that is explored in this project. In these displacements—including the personal itinerary I had intended to follow—can be found a transportive potency in colour. It is this sensory autonomy that I explore, asking—to paraphrase Louis Kahn—‘what does colour want to be?’, and in turn, what of its architecture? Broadly, can colour be primary in space-production?
Hence, I pursue an architecture of longing grounded in the ways colour itself has been understood and organized. Sir Isaac Newton’s colour wheel and the Munsell Colour Chart represent ways colour variance has been managed and mastered. As means for organizing and distributing colours, these ‘charts’ resonate and parallel projects of geographic mapping and their larger, colonial projects aiming at containing and mastering global difference. Taking the charting of colour itself as ground, I pursue an architecture that builds on a sensory world configured by a speculative reinvention of Thomas More’s Utopia. The resulting project intends a paradoxical dwelling for the cultivation of distance and its therapeutic overcoming.