Summary
It is the author's view that the visual qualities of an environment depend a great deal upon “minor” characteristics of form. Surface, light, color, materials are the primary sensory factors which affect appearance. While formal systems, if they persist in cities, offer the rational basis for their design, plan or organization, what influences individuality, character or flavor appeals to the senses on intimate scale. In architecture, stylistic differences are read in detailing and material, as well as in size and proportion. Color can define and particularize surface and spaces and seems to be a predominant part of any vernacular environment. The author believes that color sensitivity may be a collective reaction to specific conditions of environmental light, and what may be observed as cultural preferences may have a biological base.
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Painter-experimentalist, Lois Swirnoff has been observing and utilizing the perceptual effects of color on form. Since her graduate studies with Josef Albers at Yale her work has dealt with problems of value and hue relative to light and shadow, “chiaroscuro for three dimensions”. Paintings on surface reliefs, her work is widely exhibited in the U.S., most recently in Washington, D.C. at the National Academy of Sciences.
She teaches her systematic experiments with color's spatial and formal ambiguities, formerly at Harvard University, and at Wellesley and Skidmore Colleges and at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she is currently a member of the faculty of Art, Design and Art History.
A fascination with the visual environment began in 1951, when, as a young Fulbright Fellow, the urban landscapes of Italy struck her native New Yorker's eye. Subsequently, recording the facades of cities in her travels, has been an abiding interest.
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Swirnoff, L. The visual environment: Consider the surface. Environmentalist 2, 217–222 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02603101
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02603101