Apartments on the Coast
One Megabyte House
Tokyo House
Krabbesholm College
Beach House in Milan
In Interaction of Color, Josef Albers asserts that “If one says ‘red’ (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” Though subjective, color
can define how we experience a space. Indeed, Albers would be the first to attest: It is one of the most expressive visual tools we possess. The following five projects show how color can soften architecture’s formal rigidity and engage the individual.
Apartments on the Coast
Architect: Ofis Arhitekti
Location: Izola, Slovenia
In many urban housing blocks, the laundry that hangs from windows, fire escapes, and balconies provides one of the few visual bright spots on an otherwise drab facade. It’s a practice born out of necessity, and one seldom seen after the redevelopment winds start a-blowin’. For the Slovenian architectural firm Ofis Arhitekti, however, this crazy-quilt aesthetic served as inspiration for their award-nominated government-subsidized housing project in the southwestern coastal city of Izola.
Ofis approached the challenge as much from a sociological perspective as from an architectural one. Through interviews and close observation, the eight members of the firm, founded by Rok Oman and Spela Videcnik, gained insight into how residents use their indoor and outdoor spaces, information which they then used to help guide their design strategy.
For instance, the team was taken by the patchwork of sheets and blankets residents would hang in front of the balconies for shade and privacy. Ofis reinterpreted this visual language—albeit in a more aesthetically unified way—to maintain the local color. Location also played a part in the bright design: “Izola is in the Mediterranean, and has a warm, sunny climate,” explains Videcnik. “These colors are also warm, happy, optimistic—the semitransparent shades allow this feeling to flood each apartment.”
While few projects in the area have yet to jump on the Pantone wagon—responses during construction were either “It’s great!” or “It’s terrible!”—Videcnik sagely notes, “Everything new provides opportunity for discourse.” And with that in mind, people will be talking about Izola for a long time to come.
Story by Michael Grozik
One Megabyte House
Architect: Alexander Opper
Location: Cape St. Francis, South Africa
Rika Opper’s boxy red house in CapeSt. Francis, South Africa—a tiny town on the Indian Ocean—emerges from the surrounding foliage in a striking statement of color, not unlike the endless sea just yards to the south and the verdant foliage spreading all around. “The reddish-orange rocks and boulders nestled in the thick green blanket along the immediate coastline formed a strong image in my mind as a natural precedent for the manmade monolith I was placing on the site,” says Alexander Opper, Rika’s son and the architect of her new abode.
After ten years in Berlin, Alexander returned to his native South Africa to establish his own practice. A longtime lover of Cape St. Francis—his grandparents owned one of the first houses in the area—he was thrilled to build there, and notes that the reddish boulders that dot the landscape and inspired the design are a result of oxidation between the salty sea and the iron-rich rocks.
The color of the 1,200-square-foot One Megabyte House—so named for the diminutive size of its digital incarnation—stems from a far more pedestrian source: painted bricks. Fittingly, the bold shade of red the pair agreed upon, made by local firm Plascon, is called “Warhol.”
Story by Aaron Britt
Tokyo House
Architect: Makoto Sei Watanabe
Location: Tokyo, Japan
When an elderly client approached Tokyo-based architect Makoto Sei Watanabe hoping to build herself a well-designed “place to die,” she specified that it must nonetheless be
a functioning house.
It was an unusual commission.
The resulting project, Tokyo House, is a study in divisibility. Sliced through by sliding doors called fusuma, the open-plan interior breaks down into several smaller rooms. This “smooth continuity,” as Watanabe describes it, makes the house feel as if it has more than one plan—and that’s both clever and convenient: The client also requested that the house could later be cut in half so that her two sons could inherit the building equally.
Far from being a place of darkness and morbidity, the house is enlivened by unexpected lines of sight and the architect’s use of well-placed color. Eye-popping transparent washbasins on the second floor send aquamarine light throughout the lower story and allow residents to look down through the water. Outside, six colorfully painted wavelike patterns wrap the building, blurring structure into sky, and heavily textured granite walls the color of amber enclose a private garden. In winter, sunlight reflects
off slight imperfections in the walls, making even the snow glow gold.
Watanabe’s Tokyo House puts color to brilliant use, setting off a complex system of optical effects. The result is a vibrantly toned and dynamic space in which to spend one’s final days—a site of inspired flexibility and reflection.
Story by Geoff Manaugh
Krabbesholm College
Architect: Nervous in the Service
Location: Skive, Denmark
Judging from their work, the Danish collective Nervous in the Service is anything but: The cross-disciplinary collective (formerly known as Femmes Regionales), comprising four women from architecture, textile, fashion, and lighting design backgrounds, approach their work with equal parts skill and mirth. Indeed, “confident,” “straightforward,” and “exuberant” are more apt descriptors. Their design concept for six dorm rooms at Krabbesholm College, for example, is an ebullient interpretation of the seemingly staid tenets of color and functionality.
“We decided to work with shades of color in order to investigate what happens to a room when you work within the range of only one color; the result is a multifaceted monochromy—the otherwise similar rooms have gained their own identity,” explains architect Rikke Larsen, adding that “the students have little private space, so we wanted to make the rooms as functional as possible.”
Each room was completed for a cost of around $7,500 (not including labor). And how lucky for the students to not have to characterize personal aesthetic through myriad rock posters and beer bottle collections. “Each student tends to think that his/her room is the nicest and has the most beautiful colors,” says Larsen. “They love it!”
What’s more, the students at Krabbesholm never inhabit their dorm rooms long enough to tire of the dogmatically hued digs; in collegiate terms, the rainbow’s gravity is almost unbearably light.
Story by Amber Bravo
Beach House in Milan
Architect: Johanna Grawunder
Location: Milan, Italy
Milan, Italy, is renowned for its fashion and design houses, but what of its beach houses? Almost 100 miles from the coast, a loft renovation on Milan’s industrial outskirts suggests that one’s location is as much a matter of perception as it is of geography.
For architect and designer Johanna Grawunder—who grew up among the mid-century-modern aesthetic and laid-back lifestyle of Southern California—the quirkily named Beach House project was a trip down memory lane. And after a 16-year stint with Memphis Group godfather Ettore Sottsass (11 of which were as a partner at his firm), her multidisciplinary design work continues to exhibit a very strategic use of color and form.
The Beach House’s columns and joists are painted black to delineate space without physically dividing it. “The walls are painted in soothing shades of gray-green. We used blue for the ceilings to give a cool hue to the room...almost like a pergola construction under the open sky,” she explains. A lipstick-red light fixture provides a visual jolt to the subdued dining area.
Grawunder insists that such chromatically bold touches are in keeping with modernist decree: “People tend to think that Le Corbusier was all about white, when in actuality his in-teriors and exteriors had huge, very strong swaths of color. Mies van der Rohe used a wild and flamboyant natural onyx all over the German Pavilion [at the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona], so I don’t think he was afraid of color, either!”
While visitors may witness more crashed parties than crashing waves, the house succeeds in channeling a beach-culture vibe. All it took, she says, “was a can of paint and some courage. Courage is the hard part.”
Story by Michael Grozik
