This post examines my mid-career transition to making and exhibiting paintings, and in some detail, my fear of using color architecturally. I recently discussed chromophobia, the term for fear of color, in art and design with psychotherapist Rachel Melveld on her podcast.
This is a new effort to pull apart and rebuild my creative identity. In early March, I posted On Blankness, intending to describe a regional tradition to hold on to within a city so famously obsessed with eschewing traditions. Later in the month, I posted Getting over the Generic City about the not so anonymous buildings that formed the landscape of my childhood in Southern California.
Eventually, these essays will all find their way into a book of my collected writings and projects. In the meantime, writing about my work in the rearview mirror has helped me to shift vantage points and begin to see the outlines of other ways of working and being.
I’ll be back this Friday with an interesting discussion with architect Anthony Lumsden. In May, I will continue to write about the sometimes puzzling but intertwined relationship architects have to art objects, and artists have to buildings.
I, Chromophobe
I am a recovering chromophobe.
For years I used to recite the well-worn mantra that white buildings aren’t actually white because if you study them correctly, they absorb and reflect the color of whatever is adjacent to them.
This is the standard line about whiteness and lack of color in architectural design, and it is utter bullshit. It is like saying that if you stand next to a concert pianist or lean into a conversation with a Nobel prize-winning scientist, you can absorb their artistic or scientific genius. Either color is integral to the building material, or it occurs through the direct application of paint.
I have participated in a tradition of making colorless boxes for art viewing out of fear of proposing something different, and in doing so, I erased my own artistic instincts. In a way, I also forgot about my personal history when I traded my identity, as the child of colorful Nicaraguan and Romanian immigrants, for a generic architectural get-up that never quite fit.
I wanted out of architecture’s white box. Painting, not architecture, helped me overcome my fear of color, my chromophobia.
Color and Architecture
Color is a tricky subject for architects.
How color is used— whether it is applied or it ‘emerges’ naturally as the byproduct of some material selection— is part of a freighted conversation about good taste, tradition, design standards, and even urban legislation.
A handful of well-regarded architects have built a career around the artistic use of color in their work. Luis Barragan obviously comes to mind, but there are other examples.
Polychrome or multi-hued buildings are common throughout the world. In Nicaragua and Romania, where my family is from, color is well integrated with life and architecture; it enlivens streets, homes, and public buildings. Although the use of color has been a component of many architectural traditions, especially in the global south and in Asia, North American and European architects and architectural historians have quietly ignored or openly dismissed color as an unsophisticated colloquial expression or a foreign concept.
In our schools, color theory is rarely taught these days, and when it is taught, it usually tends to be in foundation-level or elective courses.1 Color is absent in much architectural discourse and education; it has been bleached from the discipline.
Whiteness
The history of Western architecture is mostly about white buildings. Whiteness, or the absence of color, is a primary artistic problem in European architecture, and it is archetypical of colonial architecture.
The whitewashing of North American architecture is associated with our difficult colonial legacy. It symbolizes piety, authority, traditionalism, and in some cases, violent action. Like San Giorgio Maggiore, Shaker churches and plantation big houses are symbols of architectural whiteness.
Whiteness in architecture— as material or concept — is also part of the dominant patriarchal conversation in architecture. From Alberti to Palladio and from Le Corbusier to Giuseppe Terragni, white architecture has been made by white men using white materials. Like white bread, white patriarchal architecture is made with preservatives that allow its stale ideas to be consumed well past their use-by date. It’s hard to throw out.
The canonical sort of architecture that the American Academy once promoted was part of an American habit of valorizing white architecture above other indigenous expressions. Not surprisingly, it is a studied lack of color that connects all the supposedly opposed schools of Western architectural thought: Classicism and Roccoco, Modernism and Deconstructivism, Minimalism and Traditionalism, Parametricism and Radical Post-Modernism.
Whiteness is the glue that holds Western architecture together.
Color
Color in architecture is another country, another language, another state of mind.
Color is decoration, ornament, and excess; to be colorful is to be outrageous.
Color is for children and not adults: playgrounds, theme parks, and nurseries are filled with color.
Color is the Feminine, the Other, the Queer, the Libidinal.
Color is our fear; the most venomous lethal things are shimmering, obscenely bright, or polychromatic.
No Color
Lack of color is not the “presence of absence;” it is the persistent presence of the banal.
Lack of color is the enforced whitening of the American soul.
Lack of color is invisible; it secretly defines us, shapes us, and guides us.
Lack of color is a denial of desire.
Lack of color is pretend civility; it masks various polite aggressions and other discreet acts of aesthetic violence.
Chromophobia
Chromophobia is a fear of color, and because I suffered from it, I bleached out color from all of the projects I built over the last twenty years. I feared that my clients would be unhappy if I used color, and I would lose work.
In the contemporary art world, color is taboo for architects to use. Most contemporary art is viewed in laboratory cold white light, first popularized in Berlin’s galleries. The standard white box gallery is devoid of color, detail, and natural light itself.
All the art spaces I created default to this arbitrary standard. The dozen and a half or so galleries and art fairs that I designed in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were all colorless boxes, made blindingly white by the 4’ and 8’ fluorescent lightbulbs that I specified. This is the spatial lingua franca for displaying contemporary art. I am baffled now that I agreed to work within these claustrophobic constraints.
Over time I came to resent my complicity with the contemporary art world’s obsession with architectural whiteness. I became convinced that if I went cold turkey and stopped making galleries, the problem would go away. But I couldn’t kick my addiction to white architecture so easily. After I stopped taking on any more gallery commissions, the first house I designed ended up being white with a few black features.
In many ways, it is a perfect first house, one of my favorite projects, but I see now how I repressed my desire to work with color.
I was a habitual chromophobe. I felt like a card-carrying, charter member of a musty secret chromophobic architecture society.
With that realization, I set about finding a way out of architecture’s white labyrinth through painting.
Art over Architecture
Color is everywhere in art.
You can find color in paintings, sculptures, photographs, performances, and across various digital art forms.
The one place you won’t find color in art is on the walls of white-box galleries and museums. Color on those walls can only be put there by artists.
As an art-world architect, I went along with this questionable idea. I told myself that my choices were not aesthetic decisions but reasoned professional choices. I designed art galleries that were minimalist or all white for no other reason than the brief I was given. I thought that was being good, following the game's rules, and it worked; I became a semi-famous go-to designer for galleries on both coasts.
I would have loved to introduce color or even a different material but caught myself before even proposing these options. The few instances in which my architectural efforts were enlivened by color did not involve me directly. When artists painted on my buildings or added a sculpture, they magically transformed them from ordinary buildings into art.
I resigned myself to the idea that my buildings would only come to life through the art-making of others. I didn’t complain when artists used my façades as their canvases. And, I didn’t think to scream bloody murder when an art dealer said of Ellsworth’s Kelly’s contribution to the architectural project that I designed, “All of a sudden, I have a building that is a work of art.”
I believed, wrongly, that being party to artists’ art-making would gain me enough credit in the art world to break a few rules. However, the only lesson I learned from designing too many galleries was that architecture is supposed to be secondary to art. Crudely stated, the art world is a marketplace, and architecture is a service. The equation is simple. Only one art form can have economic, let alone creative, primacy when they both in the room.
Somewhere deep down, that made me furious and then, eventually, a bit curious.
No hay mal que por bien no venga.2
I learned a lot from studying some of those artistic interventions with color in the galleries that I designed.
When Yunhee Min and Karl Haendel used color at Night Gallery, it was impossible to be resentful; they were my friends, and I admired their work and inventiveness. Their interventions showed me aspects of my own form-making that were not revealed in black and white. I saw my spatial compositions jump into relief when coated in bold colors or washed by lighter hues. I learned that abstraction goes well with figuration and that pattern is not the enemy of form. I admired that they worked as much from instinct as scholarship. They took risks with color that I could only dream of.
In 2013, Yunhee and I joined our friend and sculptor, Patrick Meagher, for a three-day, round-the-clock residency at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. It was at Storefront that I first painted with other artists. Yunhee, Patrick, and I made small paintings on paper collaboratively, each painting being handed around and altered until we got a result that we liked. I think from memory, I mostly drew on the sheets with colored pencils, using a ruler. Yunhee and Patrick painted and dripped paint. I may have made a few tentative strokes with a brush. I think Patrick actually burned a hole in one of the sheets with a lighter or a cigarette. Or maybe I did that.
By hanging around with artists and, in a way, freeloading and sponging up their sense of purpose and creative instinct, I stopped resenting art. I was able to think about my own budding artistic interests and my desire to paint in earnest.
Around the same time, when my daughter Edie entered first grade, we started regularly going to see art at the Broad, the Hammer, or MOCA on weekends and after school on weekdays, to LACMA. Before it was demolished, the Frances and Armand Hammer Building at LACMA by architect William Periera had an art-making space in the Boone Children’s Gallery facing the park and its tar pits, between 6th street and the museum.
Over the next few years, Edie and I spent probably hundreds of hours there, side by side, painting together with other families. If Edie showed a preternatural and unfussy talent for color, shape, and composition, I think I still had to force my hand to use color without thinking about it too much. The results below are telling. I was still stuck, drawing or scribbling with paint. But I was painting regularly, maybe 4-5 times a month for an hour or two at a time. Although it took me four more years, those afternoons and weekends spent looking at art and painting on paper with Edie sparked my ambition to paint larger canvases and exhibit them.
Four years later, in 2017, I staged my first solo exhibition of 11 paintings, each four-foot square, assembled from two to three small canvases. Some were excellent, perhaps beginner’s luck. Others remain challenged; I was still painting like an architect. It didn’t matter; I was moving forward. After my first showing, I sold a painting to a private collector through an online gallery.
In August of 2019, I installed a two-person pop-up exhibition. I showed 60 new works on paper laid horizontally over a floating wood plane. 10 framed works of mine were hung at odd heights or leaned against the walls. Again, I made a sale of three works, and a few friends traded their architectural drawings and artworks for my work.
This was encouraging: I was the sort of feedback I rarely got as an architect, money, or art for doing something that I made for myself and not others.
Good things like opportunity, contentment, and growth sometimes come from bad things, like fear, resentment, and anxiety.
Without the agita that I had around some of my experiences making white boxes for viewing art, I don’t believe that I would have ever encountered my desire to paint. Until I erased the imaginary border in my head between art and architecture by embracing color, I wasn’t free myself from the sealed white box.
The challenge I have set now is to discover if I can integrate my painterly explorations of color, pattern, gesture, and figuration into my architectural work.
But, beyond the subject of these emerging creative instincts, I know now that crossing back and forth over an imaginary divide: between art and architecture or between doing what you are expected to do and doing what you believe in is a different way of working and being.
Notes
Artist James Welling did give an excellent lecture, “Pathological Color,” a few years back at Harvard’s GSD. Still, I was unable to find a similar stand-alone color theory seminar in their current course catalog. This is consistently the case in most top-ranked undergraduate and graduate programs.
No hay mal que por bien no venga is a common saying in Spanish. Roughly, it means every cloud has a silver lining. It is also the title of a play by 19th century Spanish dramatist Manuel Tamayo y Baus.