A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture

Author: William W Braham Year: 2006 (excerpt reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 56–64) Source type: chapter (excerpt from "A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture," Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 1, September 1999, pp. 4–13; © ACSA, reprinted by permission of MIT Press Journals; Intimus excerpt pp. 4–13 of the original, reprint pp. 56–64) Raw file: raw/chapters/braham-2006-wall-of-books.md

Summary

Braham (writing as both academic and architect) examines a decorative convention — the display of books in modern interiors — that appears identically in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson's The International Style (1932) and Emily Post's The Personality of a House (1930), and uses it to open "a partial history of the architectural palette that arises from the privileging of natural over applied finishes." His central claim is that the "natural" palette is not a neutral technical preference but a decorative convention with fully developed class and gender characterizations, and that it "helps to define the boundary between the two practices, to explain what is and is not architectural" — the natural/applied opposition contributing directly to the bifurcation of architecture and interior design as professions (the Intimus editors' framing, p. 56). Operationally, the "natural" turns out to be a flexible category of finishes rather than a fact: Hitchcock and Johnson concede that white or off-white stucco, "even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color" — the whiteness myth in its exact operational form. The essay ends by reframing authenticity itself: "authenticity is simply a matter of appearances," discriminated through taste "shaped according to class and gender, as well as to form, material, and workmanship."

Key Claims

Books as decorative wall display constitute a shared convention across the high-style/advice-literature divide: the convention "appears in both The International Style (1932) by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson and The Personality of a House (1930) by Emily Post" (p. 56), and "looking at books in this way constitutes a partial history of the architectural palette that arises from the privileging of natural over applied finishes" (p. 56).
The 'natural' palette is a disciplinary boundary-marker: it "is everywhere visible in contemporary architecture and interior design and even helps to define the boundary between the two practices, to explain what is and is not architectural" (p. 56).
The International Style's chromatic doctrine (quoting Hitchcock & Johnson, p. 75): "At present applied color is used less. The color of natural surfacing materials and the natural metal color of detail is definitely preferred… In surfaces of stucco, white or off-white, even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color" — the whiteness myth in operational form: paint attaining "natural" status by convention (p. 56).
Bright colour's fall into kitsch: "The earlier use of bright color had value in attracting attention to the new style, but it could not long remain pleasing. It ceased to startle and began to bore; its mechanical sharpness and freshness became rapidly tawdry. If architecture is not to resemble billboards, color should be both technically and psychologically permanent" (Hitchcock & Johnson, quoted p. 56).
The International Style was a style manual, not a neutral document: it "produced a startlingly successful manual of style, similar in approach to the numerous home and interior design manuals that preceded it" (p. 57), promoting "a highly refined and selective taste that relied directly on the distinction between natural and applied color, explicitly deploring the artifice and impermanence of paint, and boldly claiming the status of a natural finish for white and off-white tones" (p. 57).
The natural/neutral palette's paradoxical reach: it "retains a particular authority… the palette of architecture in its 'return to basics,' resonating with the environmental, the preindustrial, and somewhat paradoxically, with the primitive, known equally well for bright colors" (p. 57).
The closed bookcase's genealogy: "traceable to the time when books were rare and required protection. As Edith Wharton described it in The Decoration of Houses, the 'natural bookcase was a chest with a strong lock'" (p. 57); open, decorative display became common only with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of production, literacy and storage forms, derived initially from the private libraries "of those privileged enough to own substantial collections" — so "books still suggest something of that aristocratic provenance, and their public display in the homes of the middle class – designed or not – owes much to that formation" (p. 57).
Books as decorative type: like other collection displays (ceramics, stuffed animals, musical recordings) objects are deployed "to represent the character of the occupants, but books exceed the personal statement and have attained the status of an objet-type, a decorative convention that can be deployed even in the homes of nonreaders" (p. 57).
Two intertwined aspects of the decorative formation: "the representation of architectural authenticity and the development of interior design as a distinct and separate practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century" — "When decorative elements are deemed artificial, they and their advocates are excised from mainstream architectural practice, and displaced into interior design" (p. 57). The resistance of books to that displacement "suggests other distinctions by which plainly decorative elements can remain architectural" (p. 57).
The profession split is gendered: "Although interior design constitutes one of the many divisions of labor within the modern building trades, the distinction is a highly gendered one, in which the activities and individuals engaged in it are implicitly assumed to be feminine. The gender connotation derives partly from the fact that women dominate the profession of interior design, a situation conditioned by the removal of men and their work from the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (p. 57).
Ruskin's rule as the operational principle: "The true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and I would fain see them taken advantage of to the full … [L]et the painter's work be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber" — with the craft reality that "the facts of endurance and weathering draw a line precisely between colorful natural materials and applied colors" (p. 58).
Structural polychromy: "Fifty years of experimentation with modern polychromy had taught nineteenth-century architects the importance of 'structural' colors" — through paint's failure in the colder, wetter climate and from recognizing "that the applied coloring of ancient and medieval buildings had been lost to time" (p. 58).
The natural is a category, not a fact: "The processes of finishing, of dressing, cutting, polishing, curing, sealing, and so on, can modify the visual appearance of materials every bit as much as any opaque coating… Technically, there is little difference between a stain and a paint… The natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance" (p. 58).
The imitation hinge: the efforts of Owen Jones, Gottfried Semper, and Adolf Loos "to regulate the logic of coating materials turns on the question of imitation. Excluding it, as Loos's Law of Cladding sought to do, leads directly to the difficult pursuit of authenticity that characterizes the natural/neutral palette. Admitting the imitative practices faux-bois or faux-marbre… opens the door to all applied ornament" (p. 58).
Methodological humility: these are "topics with which architecture must contend, the topics that architects should approach with humility because they result from the kinds of broad cultural negotiation to which public constructions aspire" — but "Shifting authority to 'other' sources of that kind [the everyday or the primitive] is precisely the problem" (p. 59).
The authority of the natural has two aspects: "the one concerns the opposition between the natural and the applied/artificial, the other concerns the related opposition between architecture and interior design" — "Why are applied, surface colors allied with artifice in the opposition to the equally contrived finishing of natural materials? And why are similar terms used in the opposition between two disciplines whose actual work so often overlaps and coincides?" (p. 59).
Core-form and Art-form: "The contemporary polarization of the natural and the artificial aligns ornament and applied colors with artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity, building on the now apparently common-sense distinction made in German aesthetic theory between the 'Core-form' and 'Art-form,' between the essential, working aspect of an artifact and its supplemental, aesthetic features" (Bötticher, 1869) (p. 59).
"The fully gendered distrust of ornament is the dark side of aesthetics": Tessenow — "ornament has, and this is said with some apprehension, a lady-like quality" (p. 59); Tessenow historicized his own figure — "the actual value of ornament can be found in the same place as the actual values of lady-like qualities… Today real lady-like qualities – distinctly opposed to feminine ones – are rare; we lack the necessary appreciation for them" — "'Lady-like' ornament, in common with the clothing and manners of the eighteenth century courtier… was simply out of place in the modern building" (p. 59).
Reform and kitsch management: "The proliferation of mass-produced decorative goods and the successive movements of reform and education are bound together; manuals of interior design and programs of public art education attempt to manage or suppress the proliferation of kitsch, camp, and low art" (p. 59; citing Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity).
The aristocratic principle: Hitchcock and Johnson — "[T]he current style sets a high, but not impossible standard for decoration: better none at all unless it be good. The principle is aristocratic rather than puritanical" (p. 59). "Like gender formations, the 'aristocratic' standard of decoration is both an emblem or badge and a shifting collection of principles and artifacts with which it is discovered, negotiated, and enforced" (p. 60; Elsie de Wolfe "used her career as a professional designer to transform herself into an English peer").
Emily Post's The Personality of a House (1930) "illustrates these methods and exemplifies the fully developed class and gender characterizations of interior design" (p. 60); her ethic "emptiness is always an essential of classic beauty and dignity" is "virtually identical to de Wolfe's 'simplicity and reticence,' and the 'better none at all' of The International Style" (p. 60).
Post's "Room for a Man": "All plain wood-lined rooms are good, as are also walls painted or papered in neutral tones of putty, or sand, or olive-gray, or wrapping-paper brown, made colorful by many books (red ones!). For a man's study – unless he never reads – the most furnishing decorations are well-filled book-shelves, not too closely matched…" (quoted p. 60, from Post p. 406) — with the 'red ones' anecdote (Post p. 188) establishing books as pure decorative colour.
Books as subversive decoration: de Wolfe's library — "think of thousands of books with brilliant bindings… this cypress room is simply glowing with color" — "Books provide a subversive decoration, introducing colorful variety under the guise of craftsmanship and scholarship, apparently slipping a feminine note of decoration into obviously masculine interiors" (p. 60).
Muthesius on colour and ambience: because previous styles had no distinctly interior decoration, "color becomes preeminent" in the modern interior, "for we are aware that it, more than architectural form, acts strongly and directly, and creates an ambience" (Style-Architecture and Building-Art, quoted p. 60).
The masculine/authenticity identity: "The similarities between de Wolfe's library, Emily Post's 'Room for a Man,' and the room of The International Style exemplify the fully formed concept of modern color and finish in which simple, achromatic surfaces and natural materials are deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity (or are they authentic by virtue of their masculinity?). That identity is remarkably independent of style, and it continues to characterize designers, occupants, and finishes to this day, warping and restricting design practices with its definitions" (p. 61).
Taste as the feared other: "The opposition of natural finishes to applied colors derives its energy from resistance to the artificiality of 'taste,' which is affiliated with intuition, irrationality, and the feminine. The repeated efforts to develop a definitive science of color effects, either functionally, linguistically, or psychologically are all efforts to excise such subjectivities from architecture" (p. 61).
Faked bindings: Post's "Faked Bindings for Decoration" artificially produce "the look of masculine amenity" — decoration operating "not according to the logic by which formal architectural principles are explained, but according to the negotiation of identity and its discovery through representations" (p. 61).
The interior's return look (via the Max Ernst bookcase collage): "that negotiation involves both the inspecting gaze of the occupant and the return look of the interior. A wall of books not only appears masculine, but reassures its occupant that he or she is conforming to the complex image of rationality, literacy, and authenticity that books convey" (p. 61).
Method claim: "The logic of color conventions cannot be grasped by theories of identity without an equivalent consideration of decorative variety and the attention to occasion, both of which require narrative forms for their exploration" (p. 61).
The deepest fear: "The selection of colors and finishes is always an exercise of taste, and any such acknowledgment makes evident the deep affiliation of architecture with the other arts of convention – dressing, dining, dancing… That perhaps is the deepest fear expressed by the privileging of natural over applied color: that acknowledgment of the arts of convention and the necessity of timeliness would undermine a profession dedicated defensively to timelessness" (p. 61).
Authenticity demystified: "authenticity is simply a matter of appearances. It is through the discriminations of taste, shaped according to class and gender, as well as to form, material, and workmanship, that we discriminate among the qualities of materials and their finishes. The composition of material and color palettes is among the most demanding forms of discrimination required of architects and designers, and for which the wall of book filled shelves might serve as an apt reminder" (pp. 61–62).

Connections

Concepts: natural-finishes (the central concept: the natural/applied opposition and the natural/neutral palette), wall-of-books (the decorative convention under analysis), law-of-cladding (Loos's exclusion of imitation and the pursuit of authenticity), core-form-and-art-form (Bötticher's distinction underlying the polarization), chromophobia (the palette's chromophobic logic), whiteness (white "felt to constitute the natural color" — the myth made operational), colour-hierarchy (the "definitive science of color effects" as excision of subjectivity), kitsch (bright colour "became rapidly tawdry"; kitsch/camp/low art managed by manuals), the-decorative (books as decorative convention; "subversive decoration"), gender-and-the-interior (the "lady-like quality" of ornament; the gendered profession split), taste (the feared faculty: intuition, irrationality, the feminine), separate-spheres ("the removal of men and their work from the home"), domestic-interior (Post's manual; the middle-class display interior), interiority (the return look of the interior), inside-outside-dialectic (Ruskin: painter's work reserved for "the inner chamber"), modernism (the International Style as manual of style), architectural-ornament (Tessenow's lady-like ornament; the imitation question), disciplinary-frontiers (the palette defines what "is and is not architectural"), historiography-of-the-interior (decorative conventions as historical documents), narrative-space (color conventions "require narrative forms"), atmospheric-values (Muthesius: colour "creates an ambience").

Authors: braham-william (author), loos-adolf (the Law of Cladding), giedion-sigfried (redemption from nineteenth-century ornament), ernst-max (the bookcase collage and the return look), taylor-mark-preston-julieanna (editors of the reprint; their framing introduces the genealogy of colour and the natural/applied bifurcation). Independently converging (not cited by Braham): batchelor-david (whiteness as myth) and baudrillard-jean ("natural" colours as "an impossible echo of the state of nature").

Debates: ornament-vs-purity (the natural/applied opposition as the purity position's operational core; Tessenow's gendered ornament), interior-design-vs-architecture (the bifurcation of the professions as gendered and palette-defined).

Related source notes: source-notes/batchelor-2006-chromophobia (the whiteness myth Braham finds in Hitchcock & Johnson's stucco clause), source-notes/baudrillard-2006-structures-of-atmosphere (Baudrillard's "'natural' colours… an impossible echo of the state of nature" as the consumer-system sequel to Braham's natural/applied opposition), source-notes/deyong-2018-history-style-modern-interior (the interior/exterior schism as modernism's founding condition), source-notes/taylor-preston-2006-proximities (the anthology's framing of decoration's suppression as gendered), source-notes/baldwin-2006-sterility-perfection-rule-breaker (the decorator's counter-stand on taste and perfection), source-notes/colomina-1993-war-on-architecture-e1027 (the gendered modern interior as contested territory), source-notes/beecher-stowe-2006-christian-house (the domestic-manual tradition Post extends).

Direct Quotes

"At present applied color is used less. The color of natural surfacing materials and the natural metal color of detail is definitely preferred… In surfaces of stucco, white or off-white, even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color." — Hitchcock & Johnson, The International Style, quoted (p. 56)

"The earlier use of bright color had value in attracting attention to the new style, but it could not long remain pleasing. It ceased to startle and began to bore; its mechanical sharpness and freshness became rapidly tawdry. If architecture is not to resemble billboards, color should be both technically and psychologically permanent." — Hitchcock & Johnson, quoted (p. 56)

"While the errors, exaggerations, and omissions of the exhibition have been examined and debated since its inception, the fact remains that it produced a startlingly successful manual of style, similar in approach to the numerous home and interior design manuals that preceded it." (p. 57)

"The International Style promoted a highly refined and selective taste that relied directly on the distinction between natural and applied color, explicitly deploring the artifice and impermanence of paint, and boldly claiming the status of a natural finish for white and off-white tones." (p. 57)

"It is the palette of architecture in its 'return to basics,' resonating with the environmental, the preindustrial and somewhat paradoxically, with the primitive, known equally well for bright colors." (p. 57)

"As Edith Wharton described it in The Decoration of Houses, the 'natural bookcase was a chest with a strong lock.'" (p. 57)

"Books still suggest something of that aristocratic provenance, and their public display in the homes of the middle class – designed or not – owes much to that formation." (p. 57)

"books exceed the personal statement and have attained the status of an objet-type, a decorative convention that can be deployed even in the homes of nonreaders" (p. 57)

"When decorative elements are deemed artificial, they and their advocates are excised from mainstream architectural practice, and displaced into interior design." (p. 57)

"Although interior design constitutes one of the many divisions of labor within the modern building trades, the distinction is a highly gendered one, in which the activities and individuals engaged in it are implicitly assumed to be feminine. The gender connotation derives partly from the fact that women dominate the profession of interior design, a situation conditioned by the removal of men and their work from the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." (p. 57)

"The true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and I would fain see them taken advantage of to the full … [L]et the painter's work be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber…" — Ruskin, quoted (p. 58)

"But what, operationally, is a natural color? The processes of finishing, of dressing, cutting, polishing, curing, sealing, and so on, can modify the visual appearance of materials every bit as much as any opaque coating." (p. 58)

"Technically, there is little difference between a stain and a paint, except that the latter obscures the material, reducing it to the thin, surface color of the finely ground substances suspended in the binder." (p. 58)

"The natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance." (p. 58)

"Excluding it, as Loos's Law of Cladding sought to do, leads directly to the difficult pursuit of authenticity that characterizes the natural/neutral palette. Admitting the imitative practices faux-bois or faux-marbre, for example, opens the door to all applied ornament." (p. 58)

"Shifting authority to 'other' sources of that kind is precisely the problem. The difficult question raised by the authority of the natural has two aspects, the one concerns the opposition between the natural and the applied/artificial, the other concerns the related opposition between architecture and interior design." (p. 59)

"The contemporary polarization of the natural and the artificial aligns ornament and applied colors with artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity, building on the now apparently common-sense distinction made in German aesthetic theory between the 'Core-form' and 'Art-form,' between the essential, working aspect of an artifact and its supplemental, aesthetic features." (p. 59)

"ornament has, and this is said with some apprehension, a lady-like quality." — Heinrich Tessenow, quoted (p. 59)

"the actual value of ornament can be found in the same place as the actual values of lady-like qualities… Today real lady-like qualities – distinctly opposed to feminine ones – are rare; we lack the necessary appreciation for them." — Tessenow, quoted (p. 59)

"The proliferation of mass-produced decorative goods and the successive movements of reform and education are bound together; manuals of interior design and programs of public art education attempt to manage or suppress the proliferation of kitsch, camp, and low art." (p. 59)

"[T]he current style sets a high, but not impossible standard for decoration: better none at all unless it be good. The principle is aristocratic rather than puritanical." — Hitchcock & Johnson, quoted (p. 59)

"Her general ethic, 'emptiness is always an essential of classic beauty and dignity,' is virtually identical to de Wolfe's 'simplicity and reticence,' and the 'better none at all' of The International Style." (p. 60)

"All plain wood-lined rooms are good, as are also walls painted or papered in neutral tones of putty, or sand, or olive-gray, or wrapping-paper brown, made colorful by many books (red ones!). For a man's study – unless he never reads – the most furnishing decorations are well-filled book-shelves, not too closely matched. Odd lots of books, reference books in calf or leather, or at most, sets of favorite authors in cloth bindings, are far more suggestive of the man who reads than are even rows of splendidly-tooled bindings – unless bindings are his hobby." — Emily Post, quoted (p. 60)

"Books provide a subversive decoration, introducing colorful variety under the guise of craftsmanship and scholarship, apparently slipping a feminine note of decoration into obviously masculine interiors." (p. 60)

"color becomes preeminent" in the modern interior, "for we are aware that it, more than architectural form, acts strongly and directly, and creates an ambience." — Hermann Muthesius, quoted (p. 60)

"The similarities between de Wolfe's library, Emily Post's 'Room for a Man,' and the room of The International Style exemplify the fully formed concept of modern color and finish in which simple, achromatic surfaces and natural materials are deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity (or are they authentic by virtue of their masculinity?)." (p. 61)

"The opposition of natural finishes to applied colors derives its energy from resistance to the artificiality of 'taste,' which is affiliated with intuition, irrationality, and the feminine. The repeated efforts to develop a definitive science of color effects, either functionally, linguistically, or psychologically are all efforts to excise such subjectivities from architecture." (p. 61)

"This practice, and the decorative deployment of 'real' books too, operate not according to the logic by which formal architectural principles are explained, but according to the negotiation of identity and its discovery through representations." (p. 61)

"As illustrated in the bookcase collage by Max Ernst, that negotiation involves both the inspecting gaze of the occupant and the return look of the interior. A wall of books not only appears masculine, but reassures its occupant that he or she is conforming to the complex image of rationality, literacy, and authenticity that books convey." (p. 61)

"The logic of color conventions cannot be grasped by theories of identity without an equivalent consideration of decorative variety and the attention to occasion, both of which require narrative forms for their exploration." (p. 61)

"The selection of colors and finishes is always an exercise of taste, and any such acknowledgment makes evident the deep affiliation of architecture with the other arts of convention – dressing, dining, dancing, or other activities. That perhaps is the deepest fear expressed by the privileging of natural over applied color: that acknowledgment of the arts of convention and the necessity of timeliness would undermine a profession dedicated defensively to timelessness." (p. 61)

"This is not an apology for individual tastes, but the observation that authenticity is simply a matter of appearances. It is through the discriminations of taste, shaped according to class and gender, as well as to form, material, and workmanship, that we discriminate among the qualities of materials and their finishes." (pp. 61–62)

Open Questions

Does the wall of books actually survive the displacement test — are books "plainly decorative" yet architectural, or does their survival depend precisely on reading (use) remaining legible? What of the decorative book used as pure colour (Post's "red ones!")?
Braham's two-aspect question — why "similar terms" for the natural/applied and architecture/interior-design oppositions — is posed but not answered directly; is the answer the Core-form/Art-form inheritance, the craft reality of weathering, or the gender economy of taste?
Is the "science of color effects" program (functional, linguistic, psychological) exhausted, or does it continue in contemporary colour-consulting and parametric palettes as another "effort to excise such subjectivities from architecture"?
How does the class dimension (books' "aristocratic provenance," the "aristocratic rather than puritanical" principle) intersect with the gender dimension — is the masculine library a class artifact first and a gendered one second, or are the two inseparable at the level of the objet-type?
Braham writes of a palette "resonating with the environmental, the preindustrial and somewhat paradoxically, with the primitive" — does the contemporary sustainability palette (reclaimed wood, raw concrete, exposed services) continue the natural/neutral convention's authority, and under what new class markings?
What would a decorative-history method ("narrative forms," "attention to occasion") yield for other conventions — the white wall, the exposed beam, the plain render — and can it be formalized beyond this essay's single case?