The Color of Cities: An International Perspective

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The Color of Cities

Lois Swirnoff, McGraw-Hill 2000

The Color of Cities is a heavily illustrated attempt to document on a global scale the shifting urban colour dynamic resulting from the sun’s inclination by longtitude, latitude and the ascending clarity of altitude. Consequently, cities are categorised into ‘light’, ‘median’ and ‘shadow’ and, on this relative scale of brightness, case-studied in terms of their quality of light. Poor old Cambridge and London - together with Stockholm and Copenhagen - are relegated to ‘cities in shadow’, while in contrast to Italian, Israeli, Mexican and West Coast US cities that are designated ‘cities of light’, the whole of overcast Japan - a ‘Country in Shadow’ - becomes an essay in monochrome. Selected facades, streets and marketplaces from around the world are also explored, documented and, as if to remind us of the source of light, interspersed with occasional photographs of skies at dusk and dawn.

Claiming to be the first book that explores our urban colour perception, The Color of Cities follows in the wake of an impressive body of work including, among others, Jean Philippe and Dominique Lenclos’ epic trilogy that colour maps the architectural palettes of France, Europe and the world respectively, Ed Taverne and Cor Wagenaar’s exhaustive The Colour of the City, and Bente Lange’s penetrating essays on The Colours of Copenhagen and The Colours of Rome. The major difference between these earlier works and Swirnoff’s study is that the former explore the impact on colour perception caused by an equation comprising light quality, local materials and pigments and architectonic form together with the ultimate perception of viewer, who modifies and interpets the significance of architectural colour through the net of cultural judgement. However, to illustrate the commentary on her travels and observations, Swirnoff’s camera is constantly pointed into shaded urban spaces and at the heavily shadowed planes of facades - her artistic fascination with the chiaroscuro of each visual urban event projecting a surprisingly sombre and often achromatic impression.

As with all books on the subject we experience colour courtesy of Kodakchrome and Ektachrome, but it is the subtle insightfulness of the text that prevents this from becoming a global photographic romp. For instance, having recently returned from the Old City of Jerusalem, this reviewer can fully appreciate her eloquent colour descriptions of its labrynthian streets and shouks while, despite the ancient (and modern) impact of countless civilisations on the site, marvel at the ‘buttery-coloured’ unity of the human scale architecture that grows from its walls.

Perhaps the main contribution of the book appears at the beginning and at the end. For example, the introductory essay on the perception of cities is fascinating. Apart from dealing with important issues of site, setting and surface, colour vision is rightly contextualised as part of our multi-sensory survival kit, and colour perception discussed in terms of how we experience the urban colour dynamic, i.e., not as a camera, but in fleeting scans peppered with momentary fixations. It concludes with a montage of thumbnail photographs that make a vain attempt to classify variegated city chromatics and, as if to endorse the raison d’etre of the overall thesis, ends with the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of each of the studied sites.

Lois Swirnoff is an artist whose earlier, seminal work, Dimensional Color, made an important contribution to the concept of colour as a three-dimensional experience. Being so easy to write off this latest work, complete with its 300 colour illustrations, as a ‘picture book’, one has to read the text - for here is its real power. While the film in her camera tends to make everything look the same, the words become the true polychromatic medium.