Colin Ball, lighting director at BDP London, reflects on the complexities, culture and mysterious relationship of colour and lighting, having been been fascinated by the use of colour since his first project at architecture school
Edited By Jill Entwistle
SINCE MY FIRST PROJECT at architecture school I’ve been fascinated by the use of colour and where it exists. In architecture, we have a few options when it comes to creating colour:
- select materials for their coloured properties
- select pigments to filter the wavelengths reflected from the surface
- project colour on to the finish
- create the perception of a colour within the eyes of the viewer
Any final result of a coloured space could be argued to be a combination of all four of these options. For example, you’ve selected a stunning walnut finish. To show this at its best you ensure the final polish is clear and non-yellowing, and that the colours of the light projecting onto the surface has tones that resonate with those within the wood. And finally, you balance the contrasting materials around the wood, possibly setting it into a pure white or black, or investigating its colour opposite.
Cartier in London’s Sloane Street.
Most of us experienced a form of Bauhaus art foundation to give us our first understanding of the colour wheel, colour mixing from primaries. In lighting we’re taught additive colour mixing (RGB screens) as well as subtractive (graphics: CMYK print). The school-paint primaries – red, yellow, blue – are long forgotten. Our school paints used the highest-luminosity saturated colours purely to save money. Each colour has a profound luminosity, in other words saturated yellow reflects around 60% whereas with blue you’ll be lucky to reach 5%.
It’s the interaction between light and materials that becomes endlessly fascinating. In your early days in lighting you learn very quickly that ambient coloured light behaves very differently from a coloured object. For example, coloured light in a space will quickly fade if you don’t have a different adjacent colour to contrast against it. Also, a complete space of neutral colours (black, grey, white) will alert the occupants’ eyes to each minute difference of colour balance from every lamp.
Decades ago on a project for IBM I had the problem of using linear fluorescent, compact fluorescent and metal halide lamps (which would now all be LED) all together in a neutral space where even though each lamp had the same colour temperature, the slight difference in colour distribution made the white room appear to be full of pinks, greens and blues. A single, small wall behind reception, painted deep maroon, suddenly made all my light appear white, clear and translucent.
One very powerful effect occurs when you use saturated coloured light on to pigments – their related wavelengths will either resonate or cancel out altogether. Blue light on a red finish will produce black or grey, for instance. However, pouring saturated red light on to a red finish almost dematerialises it – your eyes cannot see what is solid or what is glowing. Another strange effect of this is that even though the red light might be dimmer than white, your finish appears brighter as it’s reflecting in a very pure way.
Manchester’s Piccadilly Undercroft. Image Credit: Nick Caville
You also see this a lot with fibre optics, or if you’re ever brave enough to edge light glass. To put filtered green light through glass often makes it appear brighter than white light as all glass has some green iron content within it, which increases its resonant glow.
With natural materials, this same process is happening within each of the thousands of colours that give the material its colour range and textures. If a particular wavelength of light is missing, that tone within the material will reduce to grey. You lose sight of some of the material’s depth and richness.
This is why a lighting designer will talk so much about full-spectrum white light. I think it’s even richer to tune the colour range more to the material. Just as with the red object and green glass examples, your material has a better glow when it’s just reflecting its own wavelengths. The lack of absorbed wavelengths appears to be very significant.
And then there is skin. Unique to lighting, colours within a space transform people’s skin tone. This triggers a biological response as fundamental as food and mating. The tonal shifts between red and green stimulate hormonal responses, either positive or negative, that bear no relation to the conscious mind. How can green light elicit fear and horror (Frankenstein) and yet a forest walk is recommended for all of us? The answer is simply that the horror effect, well known in theatre, is monochromatic, while the forest lighting is dappled and allows white light through – in other words, your skin tone is not entirely changed.
The other colour that intrinsically divides our clients and the public is red. A host of studies from neuroscience institutes in Oxford, San Diego and New York all demonstrate that red gives the following benefits:
- improved quality of sleep
- mitochondria stimulation
- increased awareness at night without hormonal shift
- improved night vision
- less impact on local wildlife
And yet no hotel client will accept red light in their bedrooms (possibly an unsavoury cultural association there) nor will local authorities generally allow streets to go red. However, things are changing. Worcester council has allowed red lighting (60% of white) on their streets to protect bats. We as an industry are keenly watching how this succeeds as it is women’s safety that is of particular importance in the night-time environment. We’ve found so far that no client has a problem with orange or ‘fire-glow’ lighting. This cultural association appears to be immune from negative traits.
The distinct property of red light resonating with deep skin and blood, such that our bodies tend to glow in a very smooth, youthful manner, has actually enabled us to use it in dedicated night-time environments. Combined with black finishes, our red glow actually helps with vision and facial recognition regardless of the light level.
A tendency toward redness within white light is occurring across all lighting as it is recognised that it not only improves vision at night but it also secures the warm white light created by a mix of phosphors away from an unpleasant ‘acid’ tone of yellow. (An example here of how language can be misrepresentative: it is rarely understood that what we consider ‘gold’ light is almost 75% red in its blending.)
Tendencies and colour preferences change over long periods of time. Lighting is as subject to fashion as any other design field. For example, blue light was a prevalent feature of millennial lighting where, pre-LED technology, it was the most difficult and expensive light to achieve. You had to use double the power consumption as the coloured filters only had 2% light transmission.
It was at this time that we all discovered a powerful effect of blue light: it helps you stay awake, great for our night-time economy. We’ve all become far more familiar with this property now that reports state our smart devices may be keeping us awake at night. Caution should be employed here, however, as our phones are also bleeping and sending us messages at 3am.
With the Nobel Prize-winning invention of blue-based white light LEDs in the early noughties, the explosion of RGB colour mixing appeared everywhere. Any colour could be chosen at the press of a button. A lot of understanding and experience of colour, I believe, was lost at this point. The plethora of bright colours, easily achievable, made coloured lighting much less considered and the entire concept became cheapened, often devolving into fairground bad taste.
Lighting had discovered what the artist David Batchelor describes as ‘the extreme prejudice [against colour] in Western culture’ in his incredible book Chromaphobia.
Blue had shared its status with gold as an exotic luxury, recalling the ancient meaning of ultramarine – ‘from far over the ocean’ – for renaissance artists, a demonstration of how rare and expensive this unique pigment was.
Currently, the fashion has moved toward a consistent golden glow from LED technology. The stability of the warmth, the full colour rendering and the lack of flicker are now the primary indicators of lighting quality. Coloured resonance is rarely considered. An opportunity is lost here, however, where lighting projection and material absorption could be combined in single scheme. In many ways the powerful and immediate effects of coloured light were acknowledged yet were somehow too complex to be risked, such that avoidance became the norm. And so we now talk about colour but largely only as a property of white light.
I’m hoping that the fashion cycle continues to turn where dedicated planes of colour become a feature. Our desire for colours is far deeper than the restricted palette of primary mixes only tolerated in lighting. Subtle hints and tones of colour should be appreciated in lighting as much as they are within every other material finish.
Colin Ball is lighting director at BDP London
