Colour and Its Practical Application in Building

About this course.

Colour theory is the set of principles that describe how colours are made, how they relate to one another and how people perceive them, and it matters in building because those principles have practical consequences for comfort, energy, durability and safety, not just appearance. The short answer is that even a working knowledge of a few concepts — hue, value and saturation, warm and cool colours, and how colours behave next to each other and under different light — lets a practitioner make colour choices deliberately rather than by guesswork, and understand why a choice that looked right on a small chip can disappoint on a whole building.

The most useful starting framework describes any colour by three attributes. Hue is what we usually mean by "colour" in everyday speech — red, blue, green, yellow and the transitions between them. Value (also called lightness or tone) is how light or dark a colour is, running from white through greys to black; a pale blue and a navy share a hue family but have very different values. Saturation (also called chroma or intensity) is how pure or vivid the colour is, from a strong, saturated colour to a muted, greyed-down version. These three attributes are more powerful for building work than naming colours alone, because performance often depends on value in particular: how light or dark a surface is drives how much light and heat it reflects, a theme that recurs throughout this course.