In yesterday's post we looked at colour perception in fashion through a recent graduate collection, but the history of art includes quite a few architectural projects with some fashion connections.
Colours employed in architecture to decorate, highlight or embellish the features of a building are often absorbed by the urban context surrounding them, becoming a way to entice emotional and imaginative responses from passers-by.
There are a few projects by Italian architect Franco Summa that could be taken as examples of great architectural and fashion correspondences. At the moment there is an exhibition entitled "Urban Rainbow" celebrating him at the Michetti Museum in Francavilla al Mare (until 24th September 2016), and the event is a good way to rediscover some of these links and connections.
In 1975 Summa painted for example the steps in front of the deconsecrated Baroque church dedicated to Saint Augustine in Città Sant'Angelo.
The church was located at the bottom of a street and Summa painted the 24 steps using a double series of 12 well-ordered colours: warm shades – symbolizing materiality – were located at the bottom; while cool colours – hinting at spirituality – decorated the top of the staircase.
From a distance the colours gave the impression of seeing a series of coloured lines in front of the church, while the order the artist had given them elevated the perspective in a metaphorical and metaphysical way.
The project was entitled "Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via" (A rainbow down the street), and, shortly afterwards in the same year, Summa launched another project, this time a wearable representation of the coloured church steps.
Entitled "Sentirsi un arcobaleno addosso" (The rainbow on your skin), it consisted in a series of sweats characterized by the same chromatic scale he had used for the church steps in Città Sant'Angelo.
The tops were donated to 24 artists, architects, designers and friends, among them Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franco Raggi, Pierre Restany, Enrico Crispolti, Gordon Matta Clark, Adina Riga, Franca Sacchi, Paola Navone, Almerico De Angelis, Ugo La Pietra, Tommaso Trini, Achille Bonito Oliva, Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Lidia Prandi, Achille Cavellini, Alfredo Di Laura, Franco Nicolini, Iano Villani, Mario Brunetti and Salvatore Aia.
By putting on the sweaters, the wearers would create an interesting fashion correspondence with Summa's architectural intervention in the urban landscapes they inhabited.
Summa used the same combination of rainbow colours for a scarf contained in a vase, part of the "Nessos" section of his installation at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
A few years later, in 1981, Summa painted in the same shades thousands of bricks in the Pineta Dannunziana park in Pescara with the help of local children and grown-ups.
The project – "Architettura" – lasted thirty days attracting many people (I was a young child and one of the onlookers…) and the final result was a mountain of polychrome bricks.
The final effect was stunning and crazy at the same time, imagine a gigantic Pointillism landscape made real and you get the idea. What happened to the mountain of bricks? It was dismantled in the following days and the bricks were employed by people to create colourful geometrical structures and towers.
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