Colors of the World: A Geography of Color

✍ Scribed by Barbara Martinson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 70 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0361-2317
• DOI: 10.1002/col.20250

✦ Synopsis

Color can create a distinct sense of place. During my travels, I have enjoyed the red rocks of Sedona and the red-tiled roofs of Florence, the pervasive gray of Trinity College and the endlessly gray skies of Seattle, and the various pastels of South Beach and the pale blues and yellows of Scandinavia. Color in the built environment provides both information and pleasure, and, perhaps most importantly, color communicates a cultural identity bound in history and tradition. Jean-Philippe and Dominique Lenclos capture this cultural identity in their book, Colors of the World.

Lenclos' work was familiar-I had seen it in The Color Compendium (Hope and Walch, 1990) and Color and Townscape (Duttmann, Schmuck, and Uhl, 1981). In these books, the Lenclos' method of extracting color information from the environment and compiling this information as data was briefly presented. The beautiful fragments of materials, the photos, and captivating color drawings, and the summary color charts told an interesting story of color in place.