Introduction

Everything expresses colour, whether it is the incidental colour of a natural or processed material, or colour that is deliberately applied for a special effect. No colour is seen in isolation: all colours within the field of view relate to each other; when a new colour is introduced that relationship is changed. In the past when natural materials, stone and brick, thatch and tile were in common use, integration caused little difficulty. Local traditions and usage could cope well enough, although they have had to cope with a surprisingly wide variety of scales and materials. Now that those traditions have largely disappeared and we are faced with increasingly strong pressures for developments of all kinds often synthetic materials, the problem of integration is becoming acute.

Colour in the town is often used to add visual interest. In the country the observer’s likely to be different. The countryside at its best has its own coherence: a unity of geology, topography, soils, vegetation and buildings, which has its own mysterious logic. New buildings, specially when constructed of synthetic materials, can easily disrupt that coherence. Each case needs to be considered on its own merits. In the case of rural amenity and farm buildings integration is usually desirable: that implies careful coordination in terms of sighting, scale, form, colour and detail of the building and its surroundings. But integration doesn’t mean concealment or imitation. Traditional buildings in fact rarely ‘melt into their backgrounds’: some degree of contrast is normal. Moreover, traditional buildings themselves vary considerably. New buildings should take these differences into account, and where some degree of visual emphasis is appropriate, as for instance in the case of a tower silo, it may be given.

ML