The Mundane Hurricane In becoming the predominant background colour Battleship Gray has changed the perception of all colours: physically, philosophically and virtually. 42 Further, its influence will only continue to grow as architectural design becomes ever more ethereal, intangible and dreamlike. Dealing with Battleship Gray means that experience is not against the horizon, but in it. Sure it sounds romantic, but it isn’t, not really. The horizon is only romantic as a place of aspiration and drive when it changes twice a day, giving its viewer ambition via the passage of time. When the horizon is close and unaltering, it becomes more like the passive gaze of a god who doesn’t care: unrelenting, unaltering, unacheivable. A tormenting reminder that everything in the natural world will be exactly the same after you will die just as it was before you were born. The proliferation of Battleship Gray has changed if not the forms of architecture, then certainly their presentation. The countless arguments about how the field has changed since 2001 (or even 1982, upon the first release of AutoCAD)43 are as plentiful as they are tedious. Yet to the credit of discourse, it is difficult to argue against the current emphasis on the image, particularly a digitally rendered image.How architects present designs, to clients and to each other, is so immersed in digital composition that it is often merely accepted as fact. 44 So ignoring the effects of something like background colour on how materials are rendered is at best insensitive and at worst irresponsible. Materiality is an important factor in all design, but the digital environment has made its imagery as important, if not more so, than the final project itself. As a design materiality, Battleship Gray encourages saturated, highcontrast colours, while simultaneously discouraging a messy, dirty, dithering kind of aesthetic. In its essentials, it is flat, clean, synthetic and encourages material to act in the same way. The Battleship Gray influenced digital presentation seems to continually present a world in a vacuum, where the sky is always bright and a comfortably but not threatening diverse population is at 60% opacity, on their way to an urban farmer’s market. Oh, and birds, lots and lots of birds. That or they become the remnants of a glossy, darkly perfect postapocalyptic world where there are no people save for a shadowy masses, a futuristic Pompeii. It’s an aesthetic and it that sense, just as utopian as any modernist scheme for making people better through their environment: all the fun of the second coming without a hint of the selfaware. Exclusively digital architectural design as it has become is not too far from the conception of ideas as “plastic” 45: malleable and adaptable but also constrained in what they look and feel like. This is especially true in bad economies when built work is rare and mac books can be bought on credit. Battleship Gray is an underemployed architect’s best friend, and the Battleship Gray’s best friends are a specific colour pallet and lighting techniques. And why not? its been undeniably convincing for the past twenty years. Though, like all general consensus, the question remains of its appropriateness in all situations. For example if one imagines the charcoal sketches of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial proposal as a
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The virtual world from its prevalence in computer design and the physical world from the virtual one that informs it. James Grahame “(20070517) Mike Riddle's Prehistoric AutoCAD”. Retro Thing Publishing Online. http://www.retrothing.com/2007/05/mike_riddles_pr.html (accessed Nov 9th, 2013) 44 So much so that AutoCAD has recently released AutoDesk SketchBook Pro, which for all intensive purposes is another version of Photoshop, albiet one which is intended to exactly mimic the architectural sketch. 45 Le Corbusier, trans. by John Goodman, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Publishing 2007), page 246 in response to Le Corbusier’s notion of the “plastic artist” 43