Facade Look Episode 2. Colors And Proportions

The proportions of a building provide information about the age of the building and subsequent changes. You can react to this with the choice of color. Prof. Matthias Grönen, HS Esslingen The term proportion always means the relationship that at least two parts have to each other. In relation to the architecture of a facade view, it is about the relationship between the width of the facade and its height, in technical terms: its height development and the dimensions that develop into the spatial depth. If we consider the height development of the building from the base to the eaves, for example, we can very easily estimate the height of the floors. The facade These proportions of space often tell the designing viewer something about the age and possible construction time of the object. Storey heights of more than three meters can usually only be found in old buildings from the turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th century. Back then, people liked to build prestigiously and people didn't think about heating costs as much as they do today. The facade design was also rather representative: in addition to natural stone material, there are also larger plastered areas, which often also have a special structure. Correspondingly, lower storey heights are found in older half-timbered buildings, sometimes so low that a grown-up person can hit the ceiling with his head. The standardized storey height of around 2.25 to 2.50 meters usually occurs in the buildings of post-war architecture and modern construction. We usually find a finer plaster on these facades,which was painted with an emulsion paint. A perpendicular rectangle, i.e. a facade with a narrow, high proportion, has a different effect on the viewer than an elongated block, a lying rectangle. In the theory of perception, the narrow, high rectangle stands for attention, the lying rectangle for reassurance and balance. When choosing colors, you can react to this and, in the case of narrow, tall buildings, opt for darker, more saturated colors, while the wide, lying building is more suitable for a balanced, calm color scheme in pastel colors. You can also read a lot from the base zones. In historic cities such as B. in Venice, Florence or also in Berlin during the Wilhelminian era, a plinth can encompass the entire ground floor. In new buildings today, you sometimes do without a plinth completely, or at least set a colored one at the most, about a meter high plinth zone, in order to avoid splashes of water. The roof When considering the shape of the roof and the roof zone of an object, we differentiate between gable-standing and eaves-standing construction. In terms of building history, it used to be that the majority of people used to build their houses "gabled" towards the street in order to add the beautiful face of the facade to the cityscape. A problem was always the drainage of rainwater through the gutters, which were mostly difficult to access between two houses and often polluted. For this reason, many gabled town houses have been converted into eaves houses over time. This structural change also went hand in hand with an aesthetic transformation of the cityscape. The roof zone in its proportion to the overall facade is available in very different forms. The large roofs of the Black Forest houses press with an incredible mass on the small remnant of the plastered or wood-clad facade. In contrast, many historicism or Art Nouveau facades characterize our present-day cityscapes, in which we can hardly see the roof from the pedestrian point of view. Modern office buildings offer flat roofs designed as attic floors, which can only be seen from a bird's eye view. Structure of the openings If we look deeper into the face of a house, we noticethat the enveloping closed wall surface is interrupted in many places by openings such as windows and doors. Depending on the time of day, these openings sometimes look like black, dark holes, sometimes like mirrors that reflect daylight or the summer sky. They are often structured. This creates either a symmetrical or asymmetrical facade structure. From this information, too, we can draw conclusions about the history of the building. The architectures of classicism, baroque and renaissance, for example, had a particular preference for symmetry. Both in the layout and in the facade design, the shape was always related to an axis of symmetry. This went right into urban development, so that entire city complexes were created symmetrically. This symmetry usually emphasizes the shape of an entrance to a building and often supports it with its color. Where the floor plan does not allow any windows, an illusion window is simply painted on the facade so that the symmetry is correct again. This design language was gladly retained in the facades of the Wilhelminian period, the Neo-Baroque or the Neo-Renaissance. Art Nouveau and the architecture of the 1930s also adopted this structure and only recently have such structures been implemented asymmetrically, as an expression of a new formal language. Very often, an asymmetrically arranged facade picture also informs us about the different phases of construction. Especially in the 50s and 60s of the last century, the entrance areas of residential and commercial buildings were redesigned on a large scale and the houses were stripped of their original appearance. Here, solid, massive wall surfaces were replaced by large window zones, the visual stability was removed from the facade. In recent years, a rethink has taken place here when renovating old buildings. Today people like to try to restore the original state, if possible. With large, reflecting glass surfaces, the designer lacks the surfaces to bring a facade back into an optical balance. Architectural interventions are often required here. Sometimes, however, it helps by itself to clean one or the other window frame with pure,Get clear and light colors out of the darkness of the glass surface and set accents. In this way, only one color tone can restore the visual balance in a facade and ensure a harmonious appearance in the overall picture. Narrow, high facades can use stronger colors.

Practice plus

In the field of architecture and monument preservation, the term “over-molding” has coined over the past few years. Overmolding means that a shape has changed over time. You could also say that there are changes and conversions to a facade that make it difficult to recognize the original condition.