Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science


 5502/14 | Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science

Michela Rossi
michela.rossi@polimi.it

Dipartimento di Design
Politecnico di Milano

Color design in the Bauhaus 
laboratory of wall-painting  

1. INTRODUCTION

The project adopts the design as an intermediate 
tool between the concept and the building, using 
conventional codes to describe characteristics 
that cannot be exhaustively defined by their 
scale reproduction. Which is why the symbolic 
and simplified representation in accordance to 
the standards developed by technical languages 
needs a specific expression of the characteristics 
that can’t be measured as a form or can’t be 
directly related to numbers. 
One of the qualitative elements of the project is 
just the color, that kind of rigorous identification 
is conditioned by practical difficulties. As a 
result, color  seems to be the weak element in 
the expression of the project. The representation 
of color has been subject to long succession of 
attempts to be identified without any ambiguity, 
usually using references to mathematical 
models: geometric patterns, math coordinates, 
or numerical formulas. 

This type of approach can only marginally affect 
the tradition of architecture and interior design, 
where the graphical representations of the 
project witnesses a controversial relationship 
with the expression of color. In fact, unlike other 
qualitative elements, there isn’t such thing as a 
unique coding for the representation of color in 
project documents. 
The issue with identifying the exact color can be 
dealt with by adopting numerical coordinates in 
the color-systems or perhaps by referencing to 
the color-producers’ palettes that are partially 
unified at least in relation to specific design 
sectors (mainly Pantone, Ral, Munsell); however, 
the real intrinsic problem is the control of the 
color throughout the intermediate stages 
of the project, in which the design and the 
representation serve as verification tools. 
The immediate consequence of these difficulties 
shows in the simulated and simplified control of 
the preliminary design process, causing a quite 
common tendency to postpone color choices to 

ABSTRACT

Representation is the weak element in color design. It actually seems to condition 
the expression of color in the project. The la always favored the design as a media 
between design and building, by the use of conventional codes and symbolic 
languages, which are able to unambiguously describe formal characteristics that 
couldn’t possibly be described in detail in the technical representation on scale. 
Even for the representation of the color, there is a long tradition of attempts to 
obtain an unambiguous identification through geometric conventions, mathematical 
coordinates and numerical formulas, but this can only marginally affect the tradition 
of architecture and interior design. This is due to difficulties in reproducing the 
elaborate, which forced to use watercolor drawings (colored or otherwise) in the 
original.  The effects of representation tools on the project, and therefore the possibility 
of remote control of the color, required an investigation of the color’s representation 
when it becomes a decisive feature in the characterization of the inhabited space 
and therefore a research element for architectural and interior design. 
With regards to the relation between color and design, the research of avant-garde 
artists of the early ‘900 is significant as the contribution of the painting played a 
decisive role in the general renewal of  architecture and applied arts. 
In the crucial years of the birth of the Modern Movement, the activity of the Laboratory 
of mural painting at the Bauhaus reinforced the concept of color as an active 
element of “building”by replacing the ornament to emphasize the articulation of the 
constructive elements of the room. The research in design required the development 
of an experimental approach to the color representation, with a free reinterpretation 
of conventional drawing codes. 
The research aims to investigate how the lack of conventional references on the one 
hand, and, on the other, the cultural contribution of painting and interior decorating, 
encouraged the experimentation with new representation codes.



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the construction stage  and directly on the site. 
This could be due to difficulties in the 
reproduction of technical drawings and to the 
high cost of multiple color drawings, which, 
before the diffusion of digital printing, required 
the use of original coloring of copies. 
The importance of representation instruments 
and the need of some kind of remote control 
on the developing of the design process, lead 
to the research of representation codes of color 
once it explicitly gained a decisive role in the 
characterization of the shape and of the room, 
becoming a formal element in design research.
The research aims to verify how the lack of 
conventional references from one hand and the 
cultural contribution of painting on the other 
pushed towards experimenting with different 
representation codes, in which the graphical 
and geometrical concepts acquire a value that 
goes beyond their design content, with a special 
reference to the “constructive” or “decorative” 
concept of color in architecture and interiors.

2. COLOR AND DECORATION:  
     THE AVANT-GARD AND THE DESIGN

The color was always perceived as a finishing 
decorative element, such as the ornament. It had 
secondary, accessorial importance in relation to 
the building elements of the architecture. 

Quatremère de Quincy, when expressing his 
position on the subject in his Dictionnaire 
d’Architecture, defines it as “a finishing”, stating 
that the use of color can be a money-saving 
solution to replace plastic ornamentations, thus 
emphasizing the supremacy of the form on the 
color. This prejudice survived even after the 
rediscovery of original color in the monuments 
of classical antiquity, where the bright hues of 
pure primary color marked the hierarchical role 
of the constructive elements of the order: red 
along the main lines of the basic structure, blue 
on the secondary elements of the entablature 
(medallions and triglyphs), yellow in the 
decorative details of the frieze. [1] Even Semper 
[2] and Ruskin implied its decorative concept 
as a surface coating of the wall, when they re-
evaluated the aesthetic role of polychromy. 
The influence of the critique is confirmed by the 
contemporary emphasis of the ornament painting 
in interiors, where the tempera simulated 
the most expensive wall dressing, forcing an 
implicit relationship between the painting of 
walls and the interior decoration, entrusted in the 
execution of skilled craftsmen whose education 
came from  schools of arts and crafts. At the 
turn of the eighteenth and twentieth century, 
the dichotomy between major and minor arts, 

Fig.ure 1 - Reconstruction of the 

achromatic painting of the Kandinsky’s 

dining room in Dessau (1926), 

designed by the students of the 

Laboratory of mural painting at the 

Bauhaus. The original design is a plan 

with walls at the floor opening to the 

sides of the ceiling, just like a child 

building a dice, in which the ceiling is 

the face with the number one.



 5702/14 | Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science

namely architecture and decoration being the 
“poor” daughter of painting, appeared in the 
identification of new professional abilities. 
Later on, the formal renewal of the arts, started by 
the avant-garde, challenged the color as a result 
of the ornamental blaze of previous decades; at 
the same time, the leading role of the painters in 
the search for new formal canons lead to the re-
thinking of the color in architecture, as a possible 
answer to the elimination of plastic ornaments. 
Architects, searching for a unity in between the 
arts, found a new way of characterizing the built 
space in the geometry and in the color, similar 
to what they had been doing for a long time. As 
a matter of fact, in a way, they became painters 
too.
The color lost its previous reference to the 
decorative surface, becoming an elective 
element of architectural qualification. Just after 
the end of World War I, Bruno Taut, who had 
declared his interest in the “composition of the 
Color in the Space” in 1905 before experiencing 
the use of saturated hues in the garden city of 
Berlin-Grunau [3], suggested the color as an 
economic tool for the improvement of the house 
and living in the city. In the same years, Cézar 
Klein designed a seaside town with full colored 
streets and Behrens, Poelzig, Schmitthenner 

and others appealed to colorful architecture as 
a manifestation of joy in life. 
Despite those calls, design only truly started 
perceiving color as a constructive element of the 
spatial box thanks to the members of De Stijl, for 
which it get possible the balance between space 
and time in the pictorial composition of the three-
dimensional space. Therefore it became one of 
the constructive and creative elements of the 
architecture: it emphasizes the plastic values, 
removing heavy walls. 
Significant are the statements Theo Van 
Doesburg, who stated that the building is a 
“monumental synthesis of space, form and color” [4]. 
He conceived the latter as an organic element 
of architectural expression, set against to its 
decorative and ornamental use, emphasizing 
the difference between the painting (the media) 
and the color (the goal). 

Starting from this theoretical assumptions, the 
Neoplasticism developed new original design 
concepts in which the combination of primary 
colors with black and white placed on the “whole” 
of the surfaces of the room sides shatters the 
unity of the spatial box. Architecture applied the 
poetry of the abstract painter Mondrian, who 
gave up figurative painting in order to investigate 

Figure 2 - Oskar Schlemmer’s design 

for the lobby of the workshops wing 

in the Bauhaus in Weimar (1923), 

isometric view. The design shows the 

color pattern of painted decoration 

in its transparency, representing the 

e pictorial surface, without the walls 

depth: ceilings and raised floors are 

the same, without any consistency in 

the projective overlap of the edges that 

define the surfaces walls. The color 

and its representation emphasize the 

spatial continuity on three horizontal 

levels that can be rebuilt, despite the 

image emphasizes the boundary of 

the box space. 



58 Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science | 02/14  

the concept of space. 
Despite some important differences, the close 
relationship with the painting in the use of 
color for the renewal of architecture evokes the 
activity within the Bauhaus, where Van Doesburg 
was a guest in Weimar.

3. THE LABORATORY OF  
    WALL-  PAINTING AT BAUHAUS 

At the Bauhaus, the awareness of color’s 
conditioning significance had a great relevance in 
its studies, which were  entrusted to the teaching 
of painters like Kandinsky, Klee and Itten in the 
preliminary courses introducing scholars to the 
design through practice. The experimentation of 
sign, shape and color were conceived as primitive 
elements of design: primary colors became 
starter elements of the process, together with 
the basic geometric shapes. 
The first manifesto of the school therefore 
included a workshop for decorators, stained 
glass designers and a wall-painting laboratory, 
whose first leader was Oskar Schlemmer’ [5]. 
This activity differed from the others, because 
of the color’s interaction with the form and the 
perception, even though there was no actual 
creation of any objects. The business was then 
directed towards the experimentation on the 
other application areas of the school, working 
on behalf of other sections, involving students in 
Gropius’s direct commissions and in his private 
work. Among these, the most successful was the 

contract with the firm Gebrüder Hannoversche 
Tapetenfabrik Rausch & Co, for which - between 
1929 and 1930 - the Laboratory created two 
collections of oil-tapestries, selling 6,000,000 
paper rolls in four years. 
The laboratory’s activity was well documented in 
the catalog of the exhibition by Renate Scheper, 
who followed the rediscovery of the Bauhaus 
Archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with 
the restoration of the “masters’s hauses” and the 
recovery of the original interior colors [6]. 
The work of the laboratory is interesting for two 
different reasons. 
The first one is directly connected to the 
experimentation of color in his formal and 
perceptive relationship with the spatial 
environment and it documents the development 
of Bauhaus’s chromatic research in the choice 
of colors such as the one in representation. 
The initial conception of decorative finishing 
with Expressionist taste evolves towards the 
abstraction of surface-defined color with deep 
hues  showing the coexistence of two opposed 
concepts in the choice of color palettes: on one 
hand the preference for primary colors under 
the influence of Van Doesburg, on the other, the 
restful shades suggested by Itten. 
The second is merely research on color 
representation in design, with the preference 
for isometric views stressing the reference to  
Neoplasticism and finding justification in Van 
Doesburg’s visit in Weimar in the late 1920s, 
followed by a course with 25 students in ‘22 [7].

Figure 3 - Heinrich Koch studied 

color combinations by the isometric 

opening of the room box to show 

colors on the covered walls. 



 5902/14 | Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science

4. CONCLUSION: COLOR RESEARCH   
    AND DESIGN EXPERIMENTATION

The research of avant-garde artists of the early 
‘900 is of particular interest to the study of the 
controversial issue of the relationship between 
color and design. 
The contribution of the painting was extremely 
important in the renewal of architecture and of 
applied arts in general. In the crucial years of 
the Modern Movement’s birth, the activity of 
the Laboratory of mural painting reinforced the 
Bauhaus’s active conception of the color. The 
use of the color highlighted the articulation of 
the constructive elements of the spatial box, 
whose perception is determinedly conditioned 

by the chromatic effect. 
The awareness of the color’s role upgraded  
the conformation of the perceptual space to 
a qualifying element of the project, which one 
should define and verify carefully. This idea 
improved the development of the experimental 
approach to the representation, featured by a 
free reinterpretation of the conventional codes of 
descriptive geometry, which is expressed in an 
original way in axonometric projections, in the 
development of sides on the paper surface or in 
perspectives, thus involving the three alternative 
methods of drawing projection. 
The most innovative experimentation lies in the 
abstraction of axonometric projections, such as 
the joining of two different views from above 

Figure 4 - in the color design of the 
Gallery Neumann (1926) Hinnerk 
Scheper combines two opposing 
isometric views (from above and 
from below) in a unique picture, ap-
plying different graphic expedients. 
The white base to the left, the vertical 
partition dividing the space and the 
“transparence” of the floor / walls, 
conceal the merging of two different 
projections.

Figure 5 - Luciano Baldessari, color 
pallet and perspective sketches for 
the color design of the bedroom of 
the Spadaccini’s apartment in Milan 
(1932) (Archive CASVA, Milan) and 
the pattern of color matching in the 
sample and in the other 10 suggested 
solutions.



60 Cultura e Scienza del Colore - Color Culture and Science | 02/14  

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] P. Caselli, Il colore progettato. La sperimentazione 
cromatica ottocentesca nel progetto di Damiani Almeida 
per il Teatro Politeama di Palermo, in DISEGNARE, n° 2, 
Gangemi, Roma, 1991, pag. 67-74. 

[2] G. Semper, Osservazioni preliminari sull’architettura 
dipinta e sulla plastica presso gli antichi (1834), in 
Architettura arte e scienza, edited by  B. Gravagnuolo, 
Ciran, pagg. 87-91. 

[3]  K. Hartmann, F. Bollerey, Il caso Taut, in RASSEGNA 
(colore: divieti, decreti, dispute) edited by R. Eco, N° 23, 
Anno VII, 23/3, C.I.P.I.A, Bologna, 1979, pagg. 68-74.  
 
[4]  Theo Van Doesburg, Scritti di arte e architettura, edited 
by S. Polano, Officina Edizioni, Roma, 1979

[5] Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

[6] Renate Scheper, Farbenfroh! Die Werkstatt für 
Wandmalerei am Bauhaus, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, 1989.

[7] The recent exhibition dedicated to Mondriand at 
Beaubourg in Paris documented through numerous 
drawings for internal dissolution of the continuity of 
spatial box through contrasting primary colors and his 
preference for an axonometric view of the traditional 
approach.

[8] Le Corbusiers, Polycromie architecturale: 
Farbenklaviaturen von 1931 und 1959, Basel, Birkhauser, 
2006.

and from below merging in a sole image and 
exploiting the ambiguity of parallel perspective 
(as Escher did some decades later in the print 
“concave-convex” from 1953). 
A common feature of the color’s project, at 
the beginning of the Modern Movement, was 
the attention to the representation of color 
combination staying faithful to the hue, which 
privileged the tempera or other mat paints 
without shadowing, even in the realistic 
perspectives that always have flat backgrounds. 
This focus reflects in the drawings of several 
architects. Good examples are the Luciano 
Baldessari’s perspective sketches for the 
bedroom of the Spadaccini’s apartment (1932) 
or Figini and Polini’s views for the “Electrical 
House” with its rigorous geometric construction, 
and avoiding the shade of lights and shadows. 
Even more abstract is the solution adopted 
by Le Corbusier; in 1927 he attached the real 
samples of color in the project documents for the 
Maison Citrohan and later on even pen-drawings 
illustrating the “Polichromie Architecturale” (1956), 
he indicated the combination of colors on 
a schematic perspective box with numbers 
and letters, giving up the simulation of color 
completely [8]. 
The abstraction in the representation emphasizes 
the “constructive” and compositional role that they 
gave to color, as a significant element of the 
design, even more important than the realistic 
representation of its perception.

Figure 6 - Surfaces development in 

the color representation of Hinnerk 

Scheper’s design for the ground 

floor of the building Reina in Dessau 

(1927). The three rooms have the a 

darker color on the windowed wall; in 

the middle one, which has the yellow 

ceiling, the backlit wall is black while 

the other are white like the skirtings 

and the frames.