Landscape and Colours: From Dyelab to Colour Plan

Abstract

In the centrality of perception, landscape is connected with colours, central elements that impact on vision, by describing what is the natural environment and what is man made. Understanding the landscape means to rediscover the European chromatic identity as a strategy for creative culture promoting. The innovation value chain starting from knowledge, sharing, and reactivating of identity elements is a new European network of exchange. On one hand, in a globalized and industrialized world, this necessity can start an innovative place-based approach, useful for creative operators to rediscover the origins, and originality connected, to the values and the resources of Europe, the core element of our cultural heritage. Creativity, in fact, is linked to products, and the combination of materials and of techniques can be seen as double-helix DNA, an agent of heredity of places and cultures. On the other hand, the same perceptual need can generate a transformation of the urban landscape, using the urbanistic instruments of the Plan of Colours. The Plan of Colour is a normative instrument that can study and define the identity of the urban character, aimed to determine the quality of public spaces through regulation of the recovery of colour. Guideline rather than prescription, the duality between project and survey finds an interesting experiment: analysis and synthesis are interrelated by losing their boundaries in a critical reading of the image of the place. Design analysis and project are described in the case study of the territory of Deruta, an Umbrian area close to Perugia with nine small historical urban centers, a paradigmatic case able to explain the close affiliation of this project in the sphere of representation. In more than 400 tables the survey of facades and critical emergency is developed, and with the help of more than 2000 schedules, a strategy is built to interpret the state of the cultural heritage. Extrapolating values through a cataloguing action, a logic able to understand the emergency of planning is systematized, indicating “where” and “how” in a town’s element we have to intervene. Material values of materials become the vehicle of immaterial values, able to exploit the primary resources of place, the culture, which is expressed in the landscape, so as to trigger a cascade process of upgrading in perception of place, space, and society. The approach in the topic of representation is central to analysing and planning the urban landscape, in its chromatic value, a strategy of the image of the city.