ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the color propositions of Guevrekian, an Armenian-born French architect who used both harmonic and clashing color combinations and lighting to shape the observer’s perception of a garden’s depth, motion, and time. I show that his interest in psychology and early phenomenology aimed to change the viewer’s psycho-physiological state. Guevrekian stunned the landscape architecture community with his “Garden of Water and Light” at the 1925 Art Deco Exposition in Paris. His innovative uses of landscape media—plants as pigments, and water, glass, and artificial light—greatly expanded the garden material color repertoire. He unequivocally took the artificial side in the natural versus artificial color debate. Guevrekian’s color design was influenced by his peers—André Vera, Paul Vera, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Le Corbusier—and collaborators, especially the artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay and their simultaneous (simultané) contrast theory. I highlight his mastery of marrying and introducing traditional and avant-garde sentiments into landscape design, freeing color from meaning, with flat and predominantly primary-color compositions.
