Goethe’s Theory of Colours
Elenberg Fraser were approached in early 2007 by an existing client and given the brief to develop a residential tower in the academic precinct in Melbourne with compact apartments to cater for the urban young professional market. A’Beckett Tower is sitting on a 900 sqm block. A thin veneer of apartments lines the carpark, which is accessed via elevators for cars, liberating the podium facade from cars and ramps and presenting an active residential layer to the city. With 347 north facing sunshade louvres in 16 different colors, you could be forgiven for thinking the architects were engaging with the rich local architectural context. Au contraire, they are actually exploring the sensory effects of color, rather than symbolic representation, by testing Goethe’s Theory of Colors. The architect are interested in how the body reacts and processes the blended and indistinct color field, rather than what meaning the mind attaches to discrete colored elements. Ironically, given the sunshades function to block heat from the building, the palette for the louvres was inspired by Australia’s - up until recently drought-stricken - landscape. Even while La Niña (a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon, brings rains) nourishes the parched soil, the building is a reminder of the area’s environmental history, and potentially its future. Goethe’s theory asserts that color perception is a phenomenon that exists at the edge of light and dark, their contrasts not a coincidence. The contrasting color occurs as the opposite to induced one that was intruded by. Each pair of contrasting colors already contain all color scale, as their sum - white - can be split to all imaginable colors and shades as you walk around A’Beckett, the black map of the sunshades opens up to the color field, fading into light.
Elenberg Fraser