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Colourful practice: Is design education informing architects’ use of colour?

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Abstract

This paper sets out to consider the relationship between design education, architects’ colour knowledge, colour orientations and colour use in design practice. Specifically, a survey of 274 architects, architectural academics and postgraduates in Australia and Iran addressed the questions—is design education informing colour knowledge, and does colour education and knowledge inform an architect’s colour use in their designs? The findings suggest colour use in architecture has two chief influences: (1) Colour Orientation (architects’ general attitudes and prejudices towards colour use); and (2) Contextual Variables (the cultural and physical context of designs). The study shows that while the amount of colour education that architects receive has little role in informing their colourfulness orientations (i.e., how colourful they believe architecture in general should be), the greater an architect’s colour knowledge the more colourful their designs will be. The study suggests that the colourfulness of contemporary buildings is likely influenced more by levels of architects’ theoretical colour knowledge and by their personal preferences rather than by contextual influences such as the cultural and physical context of a design, the building function, or client directives.

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Notes

  1. Note that Colour Knowledge shifts between an independent and dependent variable based on the specific analysis used.

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Correspondence to Bahareh Motamed.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 4, 5.

Fig. 4
figure 4

The preview of first set of 10 questions to be self-rated by participants in based on their colour knowledge

Source: final survey

Fig. 5
figure 5

The next 10 detailed questions about colour knowledge

Source: final survey

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Motamed, B., Tucker, R. Colourful practice: Is design education informing architects’ use of colour?. Int J Technol Des Educ 28, 1001–1017 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-017-9426-z

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