'Constructed City' 16: Building With Colour

Main Images: West, North West, and South Leicester, May - June 2020

As I observed last time, my ever-expanding archive of construction-related photographs is inevitably categorising itself into various recurrent themes.  Here's a little bundle focusing on the often startling colours of a modern construction site.

Frank Auerbach, 'Oxford Building Site II', Oil on Canvas, 1960

Frank Auerbach, 'Shell Building Site', Oil on Board, 1959

Once upon a time, construction sites, or 'building sites' - as they were traditionally known, were places of drab, earth colours.  The materials used were almost wholly organic, or of mineral origin, and often (in Britain, at least) appeared to inhabit a world of churned earth - top-dressed with congealing slurries of cement or plaster and littered with debris.  The main concession to gaiety was that drab, pink primer (or possibly, its dull aluminium counterpart) often used on wooden frames, or perhaps, the begrimed, primary yellow of a back-hoe excavator.  Building work seemed almost to be a process of solidifying and shaping the same primary mud from which each new edifice was raised.  In my imagination, it's a world evoked by the early post-war construction site paintings of Frank Auerbach, whose extreme impastos of mangled paint seemed ideally suited to such subject matter [1.].

The contemporary construction exists in a very different chromatic context.  It's usually one  characterised by far lighter tones, and a wide palette of, often highly saturated, synthetic colours.  The edges (and thus, the point of juncture between contrasting colours) all seem somehow sharper now, too.  In part, this is a reflection of the far wider range of artificial materials now employed, as well as the methods of their assembly.  A degree of traditional brick-laying, timber joinery, cement-pouring or surface-coating may still occur - to be sure.  But they now reside  within an overall process more akin to assembling a kit of pre-exiting parts [2.].  Many components of any new building - be they extruded, laminated, vacuum formed, or otherwise pre-fabricated (possibly even 3D printed nowadays - who knows?), arrive on site resplendent in a surprisingly vivid spectrum of self-coloured hues, metallic or translucent surface wrappings, and manufacturer's liveries.

Thus, a building in progress may now exhibit tangerines, lime greens, cerulean blues, sugar pinks and glittering silver - all juxtaposed within a few square metres.  Pipework, cabling, insulation materials, and plastics of all sorts, can be a particularly rich source of such materials - as typified by the pretty lilac hue prevalent in many of these shots.

Another important participant in all this is the temporary infrastructure of construction.  Safety barriers, barricades and access equipment all come in an ever more strident palette of primaries and saturated secondaries - un-ignorability clearly being one of their key functions.  Heavy plant, and the enormous lifting equipment towering over any large site, exhibit ever more brilliant colours these days, and, of course, the neon yellows and oranges of Hi-Vis workwear long overtook the wardrobes of construction workers, as safe practice and a general concern for well-being, overtook their industry.

In bright sunlight, a busy construction site is a far more garish environment than the urban landscape surrounding it.  For the reality is that many of these brighter hues disappear from the site as a building reaches its conclusion.  Insulation layers vanish behind more tastefully integrated final surface dressings.  The site is progressively denuded of brightly-painted kit, as it is readied for its unveiling.  In some cases, that final reveal may itself involve the removal of another layer of coloured wrapping.  New occupants will eventually arrive to inhabit the completed edifice, by which time the cavalcade of colour has transferred to a new location.

[1.]:  It should be acknowledged that, at the time those pieces were produced, Auerbach was limiting his palette for reasons of economy as well as aesthetics.  That quantity of paint doesn't come cheap across the entire colour chart, after all.

[2.]:  That distinction between 'building' and 'construction' seems particularly apposite, in this context.