History of Comparative Architecture: What Color is the Modern?

Color is the great repressed of modern architecture. We start with the contrast between Le Corbusier's color palette in his Purist villas and the Bauhaus split between white architecture and colorful design. This split was challenged by Ponti and by Lina Bo Bardi and Barragan, who proposed totalizing "Mediterranean" and "indigenous" color schemes. After analyzing the White/Grey debates of the 1970s, emphasizing the Pop color sensibility of Venturi/Denise Scott Brown and the analogical and poetic chromatics of Rossi and Hejduk, the course ends with the perceptual, semiotic, and gendered dimensions of color in contemporary practice.