Black color in architecture - traditions, modernity and perspectives

Abstract

The color of the facades of urban buildings directly shapes the aesthetic qualities of the architectural environment. The trend of increasing the number of houses with black facades in the future may lead to the transformation of cities with their characteristic color into huge black burial complexes. Therefore, the concept of "black color" in architecture is quite blurred, not clear. However, you can still try to select buildings whose facades are so dark that they can be considered black, but with different shades. In the future, we will conventionally combine such buildings into a group of buildings with black facades. However, black facades have their own specifics, the failure of which significantly reduces the aesthetic qualities of the building. In Figure 13, you can see how much the black color suppresses the plasticity of the facade and the chiaroscuro formed under the influence of sunlight. Even the huge cantilever overhangs of the upper floors cannot create the effect of depth on the architectural form. Bright sunlight cannot destroy the deafness and darkness that blackness creates. The black facades of skyscrapers definitely make a strong impression with their size, even though the facade plastic on them is barely visible. Perhaps for this reason, large black buildings often have a simple geometry, where the shape of the general outline, the outline of the house visually works more effectively than the division within the shape itself. Black color reflects light so poorly that even simple geometric shapes of skyscrapers look flat, not three-dimensional. In such conditions, it becomes urgent to search for options for dividing the facades, which would reveal and emphasize the three-dimensionality of the object (Fig. 16). The aesthetics of black facades has its positive and negative sides. Black buildings bring an element of contrast and a certain drama to the multi-colored buildings of large cities, and therefore their construction will continue. However, the strong leveling, and sometimes complete, of the plastic characteristics of the building with the black color of the facade leads to the architecture losing its fundamental properties - three-dimensionality and spaciousness. The organization of the form, architectural details, proportions, all this becomes unnecessary, superfluous - because it will not be visible anyway. Added to this is the psychological impact of black color on a person, especially on a large scale, when black color becomes a dominant factor in the formation of color characteristics of the urban environment. In the current conditions, architects should carefully and sensibly use black color in buildings.