Breathing Colour

The Design Museum Director explains to Domus the idea behind an exhibition commissioned to Hella Jongerius by the London Design Museum that, through a number of studies and experiences, makes us look differently at colour, “one of the most elemental aspects of design”. The aim? “ To pit the power of colour against the power of form.”

- Deyan Sudjic

When the Design Museum asked Hella Jongerius to think about working with us on an exhibition, she was clear that she was not interested in another retrospective. Instead of showing us what she has already done, she wanted to spend some time exploring colour, a subject that has fascinated her throughout her career, to use that research to help give our audience a new perspective on how we see colour and perhaps to use it to help shape her future work. It is a theme that has clearly been important to her in her recent work with Artek and Vitra where the sensitive new colours she has given Alvar Aalto’s stool 60, for example, are one of the few entirely convincing such exercises. It is not a banal attempt to modernise an object by using present-day fashionable colours. Rather Jongerius has given us a new way to look at Aalto’s design — not as a cosmetic but as a response to its essential form. Colour is territory that has preoccupied us throughout history, not least such disparate figures as Isaac Newton and Goethe, Le Corbusier and Johannes Itten, for whose foundation course at the Bauhaus colour studies were an essential element. What has changed since their day, according to Jongerius, is the tightening grip of the uniformity brought by industrially produced, reliably predictable colours. One way of describing this phenomenon of industrial colour might be to suggest that it allows for a kind of “perfect” colour, standardised and always the same. Jongerius however is a designer who stands for working with the positive aspects of the quality of “imperfection” which was the theme of her last museum exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 2010. Perfection may not be easy but at least it is not hard to understand. Depending on your degree of skill, to a greater or a lesser extent, you succeed or you fail to achieve perfection. It has been a prime preoccupation of designers ever since they were first asked