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artistic qualities, something which will certainly please the art-tects (excuse the pun), who, unencumbered by foolish romantic notions and nostalgia, will hold technology and new materials in great esteem as important sources of inspiration and design. Color has a great part to play in this epoch-making age of creativity. It will certainly not disappear! The city is alive and bursting with color. Every moving object is a bearer of color, indeed, advertising is taking the place once canonically occupied by painting. Painting, as an artistic genre, is everywhere. To such an extent that when I go home and shut the door on the city, I may feel the need to take a break from color and surround myself with nature. Yes, because it is fair to say that color takes us into a state of culture, so a toning down of color (talking about an absence of color would be simplistic) takes us into a state of nature. Of course, there are plenty of super-colored phenomena in nature. Bright red skies, for example, or an exploding volcano. But these are natural occurrences in the sense that there is nothing artificial about them. There is no artifice about them, nothing manmade. The equestrian number in a circus is a kaleidoscope of color, but it is artificial. It is a product of culture, a manifestation that borrows from nature but is different from it. In the same way, technological and synthetic materials are a product of culture rather than nature, and it shows. They help shape the circus of our multi-colored society, interposed with the natural chromatic manifestations of nature. Perfect! In our new classicist age, nature and culture are constantly striking new balances. So the color of the city will display both nature and artifice. After all, things have changed: nowadays there is no interruption between nature and culture or, rather, between the natural environment or ecosystem and the cultural environment or ecosystem. The countryside was once set against the city, with the latter standing for culture and the former for nature. As I pointed out in 1979 in “Natura Integrale”, the magazine where Pierre Restany and I thrashed out these issues, there is now one single flux of culture and nature, chlorophyllaceous-urban nature. It follows that the colors of architecture are neither wholly artificial nor wholly natural. The people in the building opposite the Italian Institute of Culture in Tokyo, who complain about the reflections produced by the red Gae Aulenti has used to clad the building, should be told that this is a nature-color pattern, that the color is healthy and however bright it may be, it is toned down in the context of the urban palette. Look at how the Düsseldorf waterfront has been enhanced and enlivened by William Alsop’s Colorium. The col-
ored geometric cut-outs create a multi-colored mosaic and environmental trompe-l’oeil that overwhelms the monotonous, anonymous sequence of grays and browns of the surrounding buildings. Here, the natureculture pairing intensifies as the dizzying verticality of the facade is reflected, in multifaceted liquid form, in the water below. In Barcelona, the huge red and blue torpedo which is the Agbar Tower designed by Jean Nouvel stands in powerful morphological and chromatic contrast with Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. Another instance of forward-looking or futuristic use of color is the “Allianz Arena” in Munich, designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for the 2006 World Cup Football. The huge wheel formed by 3000 pneumatic cushions stands boldly in a huge natural clearing (countryside). A UFO dropped out of the sky, the Arena displays a huge variety of colors on its surface or skin. The office block designed by Brenac and Gonzales for Aubervilliers offers another example of the powerful use of color. Like Alsop’s Colorium in Düsseldorf, the Aubervilliers building is an exercise in painting, this time through creation of a tonal mood rather than use of geometric patterns. Frank O. Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle, along with the New Barajas Air Terminal in Madrid (Richard Rogers and Estudio Lamela) and the Léon Museum of Contemporary Art by Mansilla and Tuñón are all powerful pointers to a new way of using color in architecture and, hence, in the city.
* Carmelo Strano, philosopher, visual arts critic. One of today’s leading maîtres-à-penser, he has analyzed the manifestations of our changing times for many years, producing innovative work and theories in philosophy, aesthetics and art which have won him important scientific recognition in various parts of the world and the chair in Aesthetics at the Faculty of Architecture at Catania University. Concepts introduced by Strano include Similarity (in the place of mimesis), New Classicism, Unimplosiveness, Elliptic Work, and Parceled Town-Planning. He has established the theoretical foundations of environmental art and deconstructivist art. He has curated contemporary art exhibitions, many at the Venice Biennale, some of which are now regarded as milestones (Il sud del mondo, La Nuova Europa, Unimplosive Art, Mediterraneo Sacro). In addition to countless essays, Strano is the author of several books, many now regarded as standard works of reference: Il segno della devianza, Dall’opera aperta all’opera ellittica, Il riscatto d’Europa, Mai visto un tempo così – come sentiamo, pensiamo, agiamo all’apertura del nuovo millennio.
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