Full Spectrum, RIBA, 2023
In 2023, RIBA published “Full Spectrum: Colour in Contemporary Architecture,” edited by Elena Manferdini and Jasmine Benyamin.
Color is architecture’s sharpest tool in the box. It has indexed everything from the feminine, cosmetic, and vulgar to the pure, intrinsic, and embodied. Attitudes to color are constantly shifting. They have played a central role in the history of architecture: from the polychromy of the ancients to the great white interiors of high modernism; the figurative flourishes of postmodernism to the embodied sublime of contemporary building systems and facades.
In contemporary architecture, color has emerged as a powerful mode of working and an impactful political proposition. The second digital age has ushered paradigmatic shifts in how architects engage it. Employing the full spectrum of color requires a projective mode of action—one that anticipates nascent futures. It aids in the democratization of visual culture, opening the field to enable a multiplicity of identities by introducing new references and embracing new voices. This volume explores the operative role of color in current practice by proffering visions not of idealized other worlds, but rather radical reimaginings of our present one.
Featuring essays by
100 Architects —Colouring the Public Realm
Maya Alam — Clouds of Colour
David Batchelor — Notes on the Velocity of Colours
Galo Canizares — Digital Colour: A Semi-Technical Reflection
Courtney Coffman — Collective Palettes: On Colour and Identity
Fala Atelier — Colour is a Sufficient Material
Marcelyn Gow —Prismatic: Colour in the Academy
Louisa Hutton — Working With Colour
Sam Jacob —Colour is a Place as Well as a Thing
Carolyn Kane — Arche-White
Guto Requena — Colour as Activism
Javier Gonz?lez Rivero — Colour as Activism
Paulette Singley — When Grass is Not Green: Botanizing the Asphalt
Amanda Williams — What Black is This, You Say?
Mimi Zeiger — Uncolour