ABSTRACT
This description helps us understand how the yellowish colour of the latex model was a sign of a stigmatization of the building in its early stages. No one involved in the design seemed to have had any preconceptions against latex itself, but it was hard to believe that its yellowishness would be allowed to stand as a colour proposition indefinitely, especially in the construction stages; it was neither bee yellow nor lemon yellow, but a sickish type of yellow, an offwhite or, better yet, an off-yellow. Bearing in mind the relationship between disgust and the materiality of latex in Bourgeois’s work, this reinforces this idea that, in its early stages, the Kunsthaus was deemed ugly. The implicit horizontality, in part scatological materiality, the potential ‘pulse’ of its pliable skin, and the entropic nature of the model risked defining the Kunsthaus as being, in George Bataille’s terms, informe. This was nowhere better demonstrated than in the embarrassment of several members of the team when the model popped up during the shooting of a documentary of the building, just before its inauguration.77 It was then no surprise that the building made a shift in the opposite direction when it became unexpectedly blue – a rather un-bodily colour – during the making of the small resin model, which in a way contributed to the project’s success during the competition stage.78 Paraphrasing the historian Michel Pastoureau, Steven Connor describes this phenomenon as the result of ‘the gradual cooling of colour preferences in the West, in the steadily growing prestige of blue’.79 In the hearts and minds of the population of Graz, blue was immediately accepted – it was called die Blaue Blase (the blue bubble) in the media – and even became one of its trademarks, which in itself is, in colour terms, sufficiently eccentric when
considering the still conservative nature of a lot of contemporary architecture. The skin colour of the Kunsthaus also became associated with the use of perspex, the material chosen to clad the whole volume of the building. If one considers the nakedness of the early model, both the preliminary and later stages of the project remained with similar features of shininess on their skin. The viscosity of latex subsequently turned into the glossy and reflective perspex (glossiness can be here understood as a disciplined and thus acceptable notion of viscosity), together with the inlucent skin,80 produced a façade replete with lights and other equipment, interrupted at specific points to expose on the surface the entrails of the building - in itself a highly problematic act as discussed in Section I. But at night, internal lighting and the animation of the media façade endow the skin of the Kunsthaus with a depth and an embedded luminosity that bring to life the quality of its Neoplasmatic Architecture.
