New publication “City colors”

006 Introduction – View things or urban interface? Markus Schlegel
010 Urban Coding: Cities are sign systems, Gerdum Enders
024 Color as a memory trace, Axel Buether
034 The significance of historic urban spaces in the present and future, Christoph Gerlach
044 Favorite places – Desirable scenarios for urban spaces
within a sustainable city, Sabine Foraita
056 Color and atmosphere in urban spaces, Rainer Kazig
060 The potential of the material for architecture and urban spaces, Hannes Bäuerle | Joachim Stumpp
066 Communicating color master planning successfully: How citizens and owners can be involved, Olaf-Axel Burow
078 The FMP “Color master plan” process, Markus Schlegel
102 Color design in public housing, Stefan Fölsch | Georg Unger |
Axel Nething and Oliver Schmidt | Margit Vollmert and Carmen Rubinacci
122 Color design in private residential construction, Daniel Arnold
126 Color master planning versus urban design, Dietmar Weber | Sabine Guttmann | Thorsten Warnecke | Reinhard Maier | Marion Spanier-Hessenbruch
148 Urban spaces are forecasts! Plea for sustainable urban planning, Meike Weber
152 Conclusion, Gerhard Fuchs

Excerpt from the book article “Color as a memory trace”, Axel Buether

Color as access to the vivid knowledge archive of our cities

Current research findings in neuropsychology show that humans receive around 80% of all information via the sensory medium of color, around 60% of which is processed by the brain. As soon as we open our eyes, we are in a constant exchange of information with our environment via 250 million photoreceptors.1 Not even 10% of them can convert the spectrum of light into color signals, but these are concentrated in the foveal center of the retina, through which the motor cortex controls eye movements. Like the tip of our index finger, we constantly move our gaze across the spatially structured network of colored surfaces and draw letters, shapes and spaces from it. Every change in the color structure refers to movements in which we recognize concrete behavioral states and action contexts. The boundaries between the contrasting areas of color reveal traces through which we read meanings, regardless of whether they are words or images.

Our cities function like libraries in which we can read our own past, present and future, insofar as we understand the linguistic structure of the color codes and can trace them back to the meanings they denote. In contrast to the letters of a text, lines exist in the environment almost exclusively through the contrast of different colored surfaces, whose simplest principle of differentiation goes back to the delimitation of body and ground. To the extent that we dispense with color contrasts in the design of urban spaces, the individual forms merge with one another to form new wholes. This often results in huge façade surfaces, masses and volumes. While each line is clearly visible on the plan, it disappears completely as soon as two areas of the same color are adjacent to each other. The composition of color surfaces in relation to each other and to the whole determines the legibility of the topological, typological, gestural and perspective sign structure. Structures emerge from the peculiarities of specific façades, while individual buildings are lost in the silhouette of streets. In urban space, the descriptive spatial parameters such as shape, structure, scale, proportion and perspective are defined by the contrasting effects of colors in the light.

It is not the color itself, but the color coding of our entire socio-cultural environment that creates the prerequisites for the brain’s interpretative powers. The achromatic color space between light and dark is just as much a part of the spectrum of visible light as the many millions of chromatic colors that our visual system can distinguish through differentiation and comparison. The demarcation of the colored areas creates forms and patterns whose expansion we perceive in space and time. We can obtain considerably more information from the energetic spectrum of the environment in the same viewing time if we are able to use not only the brightness contrasts but also the chromaticity contrasts in our interpretation. This evolutionary advantage is reflected in the design of our cultural space and the associated communication systems in a vivid or multicolored way.