Assignment 3: Colour? Architecture? Culture?

This is the other part of the continuation of assignment 3. Given that the assignment I submitted back in March was about urban landscape (more or less building was all I did), we are down to looking at what type of building I see around London. When I did the assignment, I didn’t visit anywhere particularly scenic. Given that there is strict requirement on colour, I gave up on finding the best looking, or most representative buildings and opts for the one with the colour combination required by this assignment.

About the Colour of Bricks

The colour in an architecture design usually associated with the building material used. For most English residential house built before 1970, the colour of the exterior is determined by the colour of bricks and roofing tiles. Even today, some of the modern housing designs still put a skin layer of brick on the exterior to preserve that aesthetic appeal.

Bricks are used in English housing frequently because of the speed and cost associated with creating a brick. There was a large demand of housing since industry revolution and bricks are often the material of choice. They are everywhere in the city and suburb area, although they are not particular glamorous or iconic.

Although one can put in dye during the brick making process, most of the brick used in the London and south east area are mainly yellow or red. Some bricks may appear to be black/grey. Some of them originally are yellow, but lost they appeal because of air pollution. The yellow brick is known as London stock. It is made soft yellow clay fitted into an iron faced block mould. It was once as seen as fashionable for working class housing.

In Victorian London, the bright red brick was chosen to make the building more visible under heavy fog. The goal was to reduce number of traffic accident in foggy weather.

Most of the roofing tiles I see around London are red. However, I cannot find any note on why they have to be red. I believe the material that made tiles are mainly clay, but what is not obvious is why no one dye it, or use difficult colour of clay. There are houses that recently re-tiled that have black tile.

Culture Aspect (again?) of Colour

While my tutor suggested me to look into culture aspect of colour, my assignment was about urban landscape. For everything to tire together, we are trying to link several elements together: 1) Colour 2) English culture 3) English architecture (at least on residential housing level)

As I note earlier that a major deciding factor of choosing building material is cost and speed (I wonder, if the right word is really availability instead of speed). There is nothing particularly English about the decision. Historically issue that favour yellow (availability) or red (particularity for reducing accident) has nothing to do with the culture here really.