Sublime ugly architecture

Inside the “Colour and Light in Architecture” research Unit of the Iuav University of Venice there is a group of researchers involved in the investigation of the colour and light role into the aesthetic evolution of the Italian architecture, specifically the one of the northern most industrialized area. The objectives and scope of the research is to identify the main phenomena taking place into the contemporary urban environment in order to find where colors and lights of the contemporary architecture are going. The method used to catch the first results is focused on analysis of the most evident urban phenomena, like as new colors and lights appearing on building façades, public interiors, furnishing and people clothing. Some initial results are pointed into the paper. In places with high anthropic impact it seems that the ugly tends to prevail, generously sponsored by the market that takes to raise, and then sell its products. The chromatic dissonant, vulgar, ambiguous, are commonplace in every western city, none excluded. It seems that in these places the rules of color composition are to be rewritten, if these have never been. Also the urban building walls are more subject of attention from the street art, graffiti writers, stickers, stencil artists and so on. Their not institutional presence often entails overlapping of several layers run by different hands. It follows a mixture of colors, and messages, messy and contradictory, the same found in clothing of young generations, but also furniture and furnishings in the matching of many homes of common people. The lights and the colors of contemporariness sublimate in chaos, confusion, in self contradiction of our time, where the architecture remains queen, not only by his shapes, but also in the chromatic exaggeration. The coming of globalization and its consolidation has condensed the fragmentation that existed before its mass acceptance. What was not considered artistic in a place now became accepted hypothetically for the entire globe, opening more uncertainty and confusion channels never seen before. The local continue its daily scroll alongside some global aspects, variously locally amalgamated by changing not only the lifestyles and thinking, but also the interpretations. If each art should be able to represent its contemporariness, the complexity of today's world can only request a complex art. The complexity has moved inexorably in architecture, especially from a technological point of view. Here the architecture technologies act figuratively than in other arts, and then in the shapes, colors and lights that let perception, interpretation and signification. The continuous variation, change, modification, adaptation, shifting, combination or rejection, simultaneously establish the advent of new rules, if so we can say. Color and light, focal points of each speech concerning Visual Arts, including architecture, are emblematic of this change, ugly oriented, but in many cases contemporarily sublime.