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Continuing Education Use the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading this month’s ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / AIA Continuing Education article. Learning Objective: After reading this article, you will be able to: 1. Have a better sense of the trends in color and textures in design. 2. Know the materials that can be used to achieve desired color and texture. 3. See the trends in color and texture in various project types.

How does it look?
How does it feel?
How does it happen?

Designers are using new technology and chemistry to unlock nature’s design secrets.

Walk outside. Look around you. Now, look again.

Ask yourself, again, as you did when you were a child, “Why is the sky blue?”

What until now we have taken for granted in nature may hold tomorrow’s design secrets.

Already, we have captured the changing hues of the earth’s oceans and turned them into glass. We have taken the same, fragile glass, suspended it in air, and walked upon it. We can turn lifeless concrete into a shimmering pool; a convention-center-size ceiling into a changing, afternoon sky; colorless clay into breathtaking kaleidoscopes of color. Soon, we’ll be transmitting light through concrete block walls.

 

Hotel Side, Hamburg. Jan Störmer Architekten. Courtesy Sto Corp.

Secrets of nature are being revealed and utilized in unimaginable ways.

Architecture has long been influenced by science, but, perhaps never so overwhelmingly. Tomorrow’s themes of color and texture will be not so much a matter of matching paint chips as creating entirely new combinations of materials, textures and colors—to create dazzling visual displays that both delight and give flight to imagination.

Nowhere are the technologies of color and texture so evident as in the retail marketplace.

Prada commissioned 2001 Pritzker architecture Prize winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas’ OMA to transform the retail experience into something like the milk bar in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” in separate projects in the U.S., Japan and Italy.