Less White, More White

It’s little more than a century that architecture copes with white, the colour of the Modern Movement and of the International Style. White would seem the most natural choice for a kind of architecture that is free from decorations; it becomes a three-dimensional transposition of linear whiteness of the project: the white of the paper gains materiality and becomes frontage. But white is a colour – or would it be better to say a non-colour? – that boasts a very rooted and time-honored use in architecture. Conventional Mediterranean houses are white, whose achromatic stile isn’t the result of particular graphical expression researches, but it merely fits with a practical need to limit the overheating caused by the exposition to the Southern sun. In this sense, white is less – absence of colour, achromaticity – and it is the colour that urges us to build a man-sized architecture, careful to man practical needs and to the cost limitation. White is also the sum of all luminous radiations, white is polysemic, more, and it was often used for this reason – even in an improper way – to celebrate, to flaunt, to strike a sense of greatness or magnificence, becoming an élite colour. Is it really this one the Modern Movement lesson? Maybe the teaching of the masters of contemporary architecture should be completed with the easiness of white that unifies the Mediterranean banks, by the spontaneous recalling between towns on the hills of the islands and the waterfront of the coasts. It’s only the union of resources and a shared management of goods that can guarantee to the Goods of being passed on the future generations.