Towards an Architecture of Chromatic Immateriality

For every human being the colour is a sensation. This affirmation hold in his own the tendency to collide with the science pur-ists, that prefer to entrust to the scientific approach studying colour as relation between physical phenomenon, that means the approach started from newton (1672) arriving to our days. The physicians believe that colour generation is a physical event not really involved with colour, but simply with the electromagnetic or quantum behaviour. That approach is difficult to integrate with all others sciences when a comparison is needed, especially with physiology, psychology, historical and cultural, all merging to the definition the knowledge of “colour”. Because of visual event not exclusively light induced, it’s needed to support that colour is an expressive and cultural factor, able to involve all the vital processes: physiological, neurological, psychological, behavioural, social and so on.In parallel, as happened in the history of architecture, we had a continuous and uninterrupted process of reduction of materiality of products, their de-materialization, and one might say exponential, in behalf of the increase of the “intangible” aspects. The colour, in this reductive process, took part not at all negligible. Being intimately joined to the substrate on which is deposited, on which it appears, that reveal or change, held its multiple functions: protective, hygienic, healing, vital, expressive, communicative, representative, religious distinctive, imitative, falsifying, conditioning, and so on. From time to time the colour adjusted it, following the many society changes, and sometimes complying the behaviours and consequences that acted into the social, cultural and material evolution.