ABSTRACT
'Natural' color remains the most enduring and authoritative concept organizing modern architectural palettes. It offers a flexible category of description that appeals to architects and designers seeking refuge from the seductive visual force of color and its affiliation with the changing meanings and preferences that drive the cycles of fashion. The difference between integral and applied color is a real distinction of durability, evident to anyone who has repainted a house or refinished a wooden chair; however, the selection, enhancement and finishing of natural materials involves all the same questions of choice and combination as paint. Beginning with the Purist polarity between ornamental and symbolic color, it is possible to summarize the various concepts that organize and guide the use of modern architectural color in a diagrammatic form. The natural colours of materials and the colours of paints remain fundamentally different, a fact which has often led to a degree of ideological fiction.
