By: Isabel Rosas Martín del Campo

February the month of love. White and red prevail as the unstoppable symbol of a day that has been chosen to remind us that we should love ourselves and/or those we love. But what happens when these colors separate. Its significant connotations abound in such different ways. Red, the first tone that was given a name: "Red" perhaps because when you are born the living blood runs and when you die the blood stops running. Perhaps the most important thing is not life and also death, both are symbols of permanence; each with different cosmogonies. And the "White" the tone of clarity and purity, where peace makes its appearance.
The power of colors in life is as vast as the variety that surrounds us every day. White architecture and red architecture. I wonder what would go through the mind of the architect determined to impose red on all of his forms; more, of course, than the one who decided to clothe his statuesque architectural beauty with the white veils of purity. I think that the first, he opted for the strength of the imposing red, to evoke life: vibrant, without caution, vigorous leaving the submissive context next to him, the astonished streets and the neighboring buildings murmuring his unbridled passion. Or I imagine the beautiful jubilant meadow of so much daring contrasted with its own greenery as vivid as the inviting red.

So I admire the challenging freedom of Joäo Morgado in his work Casa das Artes Miranda do Corvo in Portugal. Majestic and monumental, it stands on the natural carpet that shelters it, complicit in its chromatic beauty; whose objective is to accommodate culture and art within its enclosure. Of course, red is the demarcation that art is life and passion. Like Alexey Naroditskiy's Barcode, St. Petersburg, a suggestive shopping center perched on the gray of the pavement that submissively supports its subliminal barcode with admiration. Its architectural literalness imposes itself without discretion. So I can not forget the Red Wall housing complex of the recently deceased Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill who always showed a predilection for disruptive architecture without functionalist and rational ideals. The reddened concrete titans are dislodged in such a way that it seems that they emerged from the water to impose their fury. The recent and controversial series The Squid Game was greatly inspired by its atmospheres of interior spaces in these enclosures that talk about life and death.
Finally, the Housing commissioned by André Pihl's Swedish cooperative SKB caught my attention, whose red concrete prism with protruding cubes of glass light look like geometric plasma containers ejected into the void from the outside. Once again to make us feel that red is the color, above all, of life in any of its temperatures.
It changes the visual sensation when it comes to buildings ennobled by the lineage of white, its perfection, its quiet compliance with the common place. The white building, unlike the red one, does not confront, it does not seduce, it does not alter, it is not controversial. It simply adapts to any context. I can name a few or many. Who cares, today fashion imposes color palettes where neutrality silences the vividness of colors. Entire streets look silent, unassuming, thinking that neutrality is the beauty dictated by aesthetics. Without knowing that colors stimulate, promote and enliven life.
How could an architecture be determined without the vividness of colour. Perhaps believing that life is given in the vegetation that accompanies it, or in the game of dark chiaros that dance at the whim of the sun, or perhaps, in the user's own movement. But white is truly a color, why so silent and prudent has it been able to displace the sovereignty of the chromatic and spectral colors that are distributed in each and every one of the elements in nature. Perhaps its imposing perfection is an imposed dissimulation, after all using it requires no effort to combine.
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