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This exhibition intends to show some aspects of the nature
of colour and material practice in architecture. It is not an
extensive review, rather we have chosen to focus on some
limited but nevertheless fundamental aspects of the prac-
tice that influence the colouring of our urban environment.
Colour and materiality play an essential role in shaping
our perception of place and identity, colour and material is
information, it tells us stories about history, about identi-
ties, about territories and functions, about differentiation
or belonging. Colour also informs us of the fluctuations of
private and public economy and ideas of social status over
time.We absorb colour both consciously and unconscious-
ly into our narratives of place and its changing qualities in
relation to weather and the seasons make it integral to our
personal mythologies of locations and their atmosphere.
When we think of colour in Trondheim it is perhaps inevi-
table that we think first of the remaining clusters of older
wood building with their chromatic and tonal variation
in easily framed blocks of pictorial relationships, but this
is only a small element in the city’s overall chromatic and
material gestalt.The city’s colour image is a complex web
of relationships between zones and individual elements
each with specific attributes from different periods of archi-
tectural production all with evolving material, detail and
tectonic implementations. However none of these zones
are perfectly or permanently consolidated.All are suscep-
tible to changes in patterns of use, of ownership and the
tendencies of fashion, this last exemplified by a recent drift
from chromatic to achromatic colour schemes.We can
speak of “area character” at micro and macro levels, these
characteristics are under pressure from the requirement
for increased of urban density, from radical shifts in scale
and proportion and not least from the often reflective or
Colour in the City
Alex Booker
professor ved instittut for byggekunst form og farge
NTNU