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COLORZOOM
COLORZOOM is an investigation into the disciplinary status of color in architecture.
The design investigations of COLORZOOM pursue architectural color in both the broad context of increasingly image-driven architectural practice and a discrete historical moment in which architecture must proceed in a digital and distributed manner. COLORZOOM is a proto-pedagogy which positions color as the central driver of the design process. It proposes its series of didactic color exercises as a new curriculum for architects exploring the perception and production of color in the context of contemporary design tools.
Despite a widening void of expertise and the disappearance of color curriculum from most architectural academies, color saturates the built environment and daily life. As the techniques and technologies of architectural production transition architecture from a practice of drawing to one of image-making, pixel and image become elevated to a status typically reserved for form and line.
In the context of this disciplinary and technological shift, COLORZOOM identifies a necessity for image-making expertise. And, if a future of architectural imaging is to have a kind of tectonics, color may well be its structure. COLORZOOM attempts to wrangle with the disciplinary haiku of color – to wade through its uncomfortable mixture of light and material and culture and perception – to reposition color as an active protagonist in architectural design.
COLORZOOM makes its home in the SMArchS Design discipline group at MIT, and hopefully advances the argument that the fundamental elements of design are as legitimate and critical to architecture as any other line of research or inquiry.
This project sets out from a naive position: I had little understanding of color, no formal training in the area, and I suspected I would do well to correct this. Any expertise perceived here was built up in short order, and the process, exploration, and techniques at work here are laid bare. Color as an area of inquiry is impossibly broad and only in our impoverished state of color understanding would the proposition be accepted at all – in this sense, COLORZOOM justifies its own existence.
COLORZOOM, in the formulation of its design experiments and in its historical research, focuses on the physical and digital techniques of color production, and on the various approaches to color classification which formalize color into an understandable body of knowledge.
It is proposed as a proto-pedagogy for the color training of the 21st century architect. While the experiments here were carried out by the author (and only the author) the multi-stranded structure of the thesis isolates color in relationship to other individual disciplinary concerns and may be read as the framework for a future course. In this way, COLORZOOM allows itself distance from the professional practice of architecture, instead emerging from and commenting on the culture of contemporary architectural academy.
