Some architects love colour, some are unmoved by it, some hate it, and some love to dismiss it as too peripheral for architecture. So, while the debate on colour in architecture is far from being a new one, it is not finished, and probably never will; there are some architects who haven’t been afraid of using broad swathes of colour in their work at all. And Colour has made a spectacular return to much of contemporary international architecture. In recent years the two 'extreme' approaches have lived side by side: those architects who strive for chromatic variety in their work and those who advocate the colour white.
This paper aims to study colour as an essential element used in architectural projects that contributes to the visual quality of a building and highlights the various factors that affect our colour perception. The study highlights how colour can be used as a strategic tool to accentuate the form, strengthen a formal concept of a building and reinforce a building’s dialogue with the surrounding landscape. It can help to visually distinguish a building from the background or can help to blend in it thereby explaining two extreme concepts of mimicry and singularity, harmony being an intermediate one.
The study also explains how colour describes architecture, alters the building dimensions or visual weight and can play with the texture of the building. Also, when colour is used as a strategy to emphasize the architectural shape, it communicates some aspects of the metric, the structural system, the logic of formal operations used in design amongst other elements.
The research includes the study on the meaning of colour. Colours have meanings for the observers in a specific context and architects can use colour to codify specific information. These meanings can be cultural and conventional or might rely on more subconscious psychological roots. So colours are useful for formulating and understanding a message within a specific context. This narrative potential of colour can help the viewer to understand the space or an object and its peculiarities.
Keywords: Colour, perceptions, architecture, elements