WHY SO WHITE?

Still from Severance, created by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Still and Aoife McArdle, screened on Apple TV+

I am not a fan of stark whites. Whilst the colour white has its place in architecture, I object to its use as a ‘given’, or a default colour.  Why?  Because, in my opinion there is far too much of it, used unthinkingly.  

Isn’t anything we do automatically, a potential blind spot?

In architecture, as in other aspects of culture, white and whiteness is loaded with meaning and associations. This alone is reason to question its use and to use it with utmost care.  The whitest whites are the most problematic; the whites of refrigeration, toilets, laboratories, bleach, and operating theatres. These whites are anti-nature, symbolising sterility and the absence of bacteria, germs, disease.

HOWEVER appealing this might sound to the germaphobes among us, we now know that humans are not meant to live in sterile environments, and we do not thrive in them.  We ourselves are walking bags of microbial activity, and apparently contain more bacterial cells than human ones. 

Outdated cultural associations that marry whiteness and cleanliness/goodness/etc need a shakeup. Having just lived through another age of ‘plague’ without the need for the government to go round with the lime wash bucket painting and disinfecting houses, (which is what happened in Sydney c1900), we should be in a position to let go of the idea that white equals clean, or is somehow more noble than other colours.

Study the whites in nature - I have yet to experience a white in the natural world that is as bland and lifeless as the titanium white which is the basis of most white paint for buildings.

I was thinking about this during my summer holiday in North East Tasmania, where the sand is incredibly fine and white, due to its high quartz content (derived from granitic geology). But when you look up close, there’s still a lot of colour in the sand grains. This is why I dislike the cold whites that are found on way too many colour charts. They don’t represent the complexity and beauty of whites in the wild. A beautiful, humane white is slightly warm, and contains the complexity of colour found in a handful of sand.

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty on this topic, there is an article about the whitest sand in Australia (it is in WA). Jervis Bay, which shamelessly promotes itself as the world’s whitest beach, isn’t even the whitest in Australia!

Our obsession with white beaches is partly explained by the fact that it creates gorgeous pale aquamarine and turquoise water. Which I admit is lovely.

Still from Severance, created by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Still and Aoife McArdle, screened on Apple TV+. The design of Apple TV’s Severance is a fantastic colour study. The use of white to symbolise a kind of psychological vacuum, a space of work without memory, personality or humanity is of particular interest to me, and a good thing for architects and interior designers to keep in mind when specifying interior finishes!

Beaches aside, and reliably informed that a white house is not cleaner than a pink or brown house, or any other colour, are you ready to step into a post-white future where all colours are equal?

Last year I wrote a short piece about Whitewashing in relation to architecture, which includes the dictionary definition;

Whitewashing: to gloss over, to try and avoid scrutiny or proper examination. To whitewash: to completely defeat an opponent; to cover something up, to deny or undermine difference. Whitewash: a paint made of lime, used as a disinfectant, to cleanse buildings during the plague, to counteract germs and disease in hospitals.

I have not changed my opinion that white buildings are often anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-social. This quote from artist Olafur Eliasson has inspired me for many years and is a valuable text for all creative practitioners.

One could, generalising slightly, easily make a small thought-experiment based on the whiteness of lime, a disinfectant that was once thrown into mass graves to prevent diseases from spreading. As early as the Renaissance, it functioned in the laboratories of alchemists as a bactericide. Hospitals used lime to whitewash and disinfect their walls, and soon the colour white became the equivalent of clean. Christianity quickly adopted the purifying status of white light, for instance in the northern European Romanesque churches and later in the Protestant churches, in whose architecture the colour white became more and more dominant from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. By the time of industrialisation, when modernity also introduced its dogmas for a healthy, good life, the colour white was already deeply rooted in our culture as the only truly purifying colour. As the twentieth century developed, the modernists came to believe that an open and clean space was the best platform for the execution of artistic self-realization, and white made its way into the art galleries and museums, becoming the dominant colour of the institutional frame in which art was communicated – the so- called White Cube. Imagine if lime by nature had been bright yellow; maybe the now well-known gallery formula would have been based on this colour – the Yellow Cube. Then our history would have been altogether different.

Olafur Eliasson

Next time you are specifying your ‘go to shade of white’ in the Finishes Schedule, remember: to whitewash means to gloss over and to avoid proper consideration, to annihilate one's opponent, and to deny and undermine difference.

Can you choose a richer interplay of colour and material - to embrace diversity, and let the complexity of nature in? Are you ready to embrace a post-white architecture?!  There’s a world of possibilities awaiting.

Here’s a recent Lymesmith project for a client with a deep loathing for white architecture, and a deep love of Kodachrome photography, which I’ve called the Kodachrome Apartment. Photo: Anthony Browell