050 FOCUS


SINCE MY FIRST PROJECT at architecture school I’ve been fascinated by the use of colour and where it exists. In architecture, we have a few options when it comes to creating colour:


Pigments of the


imagination Colin Ball reflects on the


complexities, culture and mysterious relationship of colour and lighting


• select materials for their coloured properties • select pigments to filter the wavelengths reflected from the surface


• project colour on to the finish • create the perception of a colour within the eyes of the viewer


Any final result of a coloured space could be argued to be a combination of all four of these options. For example, you’ve selected a stunning walnut finish. To show this at its best you ensure the final polish is clear and non-yellowing, and that the colours of the light projecting onto the surface has tones that resonate with those within the wood. And finally, you balance the contrasting materials around the wood, possibly setting it into a pure white or black, or investigating its colour opposite.


Most of us experienced a form of Bauhaus art foundation to give us our first understanding of the colour wheel, colour mixing from primaries. In lighting we’re taught additive colour mixing (RGB screens) as well as subtractive (graphics: CMYK print). Te school-paint primaries – red, yellow, blue – are long forgotten. Our school paints used the highest-luminosity saturated colours purely to save money. Each colour has a profound luminosity, in other words saturated yellow reflects around 60% whereas with blue you’ll be lucky to reach 5%. It’s the interaction between light and materials that becomes endlessly fascinating. In your early days in


lighting you learn very quickly that ambient coloured light behaves very differently from a coloured object. For example, coloured light in a space will quickly fade if you don’t have a different adjacent colour to contrast against it. Also, a complete space of neutral colours (black, grey, white) will alert the occupants’ eyes to each minute difference of colour balance from every lamp. Decades ago on a project for IBM I had the problem of using linear fluorescent, compact fluorescent and metal halide lamps (which would now all be LED) all together in a neutral space where even though each lamp had the same colour temperature, the slight difference in colour distribution made the white room appear to be full of pinks, greens and blues. A single, small wall behind reception, painted deep maroon, suddenly made all my light appear white, clear and translucent. One very powerful effect occurs when you use saturated coloured light on to pigments – their related wavelengths will either resonate or cancel out altogether. Blue light on a red finish will produce black or grey, for instance. However, pouring saturated red light on to a red


NICK CAVILLE


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