The Visible and the Invisible

The Visible and the Invisible: Color Contrast Phenomena in Space deals with the changes in color that arise in space, primarily simultaneous contrast in three dimensions.

The typical account of simultaneous contrast is that the contrast phenomenon occurs between two or more areas of color seen together, which thus affect one another.

The book broadens this view and traces the history and theory of contrast phenomena from antiquity to the present age. The Visible and the Invisible explores color contrast phenomena in a context of visual culture and aesthetics, in architecture and in art.

Early modernism manifested an interest in color contrasts and perception, which lead the way to a new interdisciplinary outlook on vision and simultaneity. Walter Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, Sonia Delaunay, van Doesburg, and Bergson are important figures in this movement, and so are the architects Le Corbusier and Bruno Taut, who form a background to the book’s concluding discussion on color contrast phenomena in the Swiss architecture of today.

Gertrud Olsson is an architect and color researcher at the School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The Visible and the Invisible is her PhD thesis.