Color Me Red
Artwork: designslinger]
Red. A word that describes a color, a mood, and sometimes a political viewpoint. For
architect Cesar Pelli, it is the color of the glass skin he has chosen to cover the final building, of a three building complex, in West Hollywood, CA. Pelli's Pacific Design Center opened in 1975 with building one, the "Blue Whale"; it was followed by the green building in 1988; the red building, which completes the project, is scheduled to open in 2010. According to the LA Times, Pelli was in town recently to inspect a 30 foot high sample of the exterior cladding to ensure that the scarlet color was correct. It is a choice, "(That) would have been impossible in the 1970s because of the political implications of the color. Red is wonderful, though," the architect told the paper.
One of the most celebrated uses of red was in the Billy Baldwin designed apartment
for Diana Vreeland. The legendary interior decorator gave the fashion legend a home filled with variations of her favorite color. Vreeland was the fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1939-1962, and editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1963-1971. She was famous for her red nail polish, red rouged cheeks, pitch black hair, charisma and individuality. Vreeland told Baldwin she wanted her Park Avenue apartment to look like "a garden in hell," and in 1955, he gave her his garden version with red laquer, red wallpaper, red carpets and wild patterns - which she adored.
Red is one of the three primary colors (the others are green and blue) and cannot
be created by mixing other colors together. With the advent of computer technology and programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, you don't have to be a professional painter to experiment with color. The brushes in the artwork above, use red as a base but are changed as the C(ian), M(agenta), Y(ellow), and K(black) ratios are altered. It's the same procedure that painters have used for centuries, manually mixing tints together to create new versions of the same hue, but now anyone with a computer graphics program can do it on their own.
And, technology has made it possible for the color of Cesar Pelli's building to be as
vibrant as it is, because the process of producing the glass and making it so red, wasn't around 33 years ago. As Ms. Vreeland was once quoted as saying, "Red is the great clarifier - bright and revealing. I can't imagine becoming bored with red."
Posted by designslinger at 10/6/2008 8:54 AM 
Categories: Interior Design, Color, Apparel, Architects
Categories: Interior Design, Color, Apparel, Architects
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