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The colourful past of the Royal Festival Hall
Patrick Baty
Abstract
Opd o 3 Ma 1951, th Roal Fstial Hall was to bcom modr Britai’s rst pblic bildig. I 2003 I was askdto carr ot a aalsis o th pait i th aditorim ad ors as part o a major rstoratio projct o this icoic bildig. Thcolors od wr scitl xpctd ad cotrorsial to lad to rthr phass o aalsis big commissiod. Dobtswr iitiall xprssd abot th wisdom o ristatig sch a schm, bt it has ow b do. As wll as dscribig what wasod, th ollowig topics ar discssd: (a) cotmporar thoghts o pait color i bildigs; (b) th idirct ifc o LCorbsir o th dcoratio o th Roal Fstial Hall; (c) a bri accot o th Hrtordshir Schools Projct which ld to mchwork o color, ad (d) th rst rag o colors dsigd b architcts spcicall or bildig prposs.
Keywords
pait aalsis, Fstial o Britai, Prism, Ozat, cotrasts, Archrom, Msll, British Stadard
Historical background
Even while German bombs were alling, plans were beingmade or the rebuilding o London aer the Second WorldWar. Te
County o London Plan
drawn up by J.H. Forshawand Sir Patrick Abercrombie in 1943 had pointed out one o the great anomalies o the capital. While the north side o theRiver Tames rom Westminster eastwards was lined withmagnicent buildings and an embankment road, the Surrey side had or many years been ‘the object o all the architec-tural scorn o England’ (Myers 1949 cited in Stamp 2001).Tey believed that: ‘Cleared o its encumbrances, equippedwith a continuous strip o grass and a wide esplanade … thisarea … might well include a great cultural centre embracing,among other eatures, a modern theatre, a large concert hall,and the headquarters o various organizations’ (Forshaw andAbercrombie 1943: 131).Aer the war, the government decided that the centenary o the 1851 Great Exhibition would be marked by a Festivalo Britain, and the site chosen to house this would be thestretch o Lambeth riverside either side o Hungerord Bridge(Saunders 1984: 378–9).In 1948, the new architect o the London County Council,Robert Matthew, was asked i a concert hall could be builtby mid-1951. He believed this to be possible and assembleda team to carry out the work. Leslie Martin led the design,Peter Moro took charge o all detail design development, andEdwin Williams undertook contract coordination. As JohnMcKean stated:Tose early post war years were lled with the searchor methods o building houses as cars or aeroplaneswere built. Te corollary, o course, was the need to
design
buildings like that too, ocussing on the appro-priate and ecient use o technology; scientic man-agement, and the value o a test base in research anddevelopment. Te architect’s authority would nolonger be based on a mysterious sensibility but on thedisinterested skill o the benevolent technician; thenew design method would be the scientic method –identiy the problem; research, analyse and organize;and then, somehow, the new
method 
would producethe right result (McKean 2001: 2–3).An analysis o the paint employed suggests that thismethodical approach also appears to have extended to thecolours that were selected or the Royal Festival Hall.Opened on 3 May 1951, the Royal Festival Hall was tobecome modern Britain’s rst public building. As built, it wasseverely compromised in various ways. Some improvementswere carried out in 1963–64 and a major rethink o the build-ing has been taking place in recent years as part o the
SouthBank Masterplan
. In early 2003 I was tasked to carry out anexamination o the paint in selected areas o the auditoriumand oyers. Te report came up with some quite unexpectedndings and it became clear that urther work would be nec-essary to establish how other suraces had been treated. Asecond report was issued in January 2005 and the combinedndings have been used to guide the recent redecoration.
1
Paints employed
Prior to the investigation it was clear that very little had beenrecorded o the paints originally employed in the building
 
 THe COLOuRFuL PAST OF THe ROyAL FeSTIvAL HALL 245
although it was known that a variety o dierent types hadbeen used:
2
1 A fat oil paint was applied over a nely stippled stonepaint on the oyer ceiling in order to obtain ‘a truly matt surace’ with a degree o texture. Tis was essentialbecause o the large amount o light streaming in romthe windows.2 Te suspended auditorium ceiling was sprayed with a‘synthetic emulsion fat paint’. A water-based coatingwas selected because o the inclusion o lime-bound ver-miculite on top o the brous plaster and the need or thesuspended scaold to be removed quickly.3 Te acoustic slabs on the auditorium ceiling, which weremade o woodwool, were sprayed with a distemper. As‘distemper’ is a generic term it is not clear what type wasused, although it was probably an oil- or casein-boundtype.4 Chlorinated rubber paint was used on the structural con-crete in the boiler house. In common with the suracesin other areas it was appreciated that the high alkalinity o new concrete and plaster was likely to have an adverseaect on standard oil-based paints.Work that I was carrying out at the same time had rein-orced my belie that the post-war period saw a great dealo change in the types o paint in use.
3
Te early alkyd resinpaints had begun to replace the traditional linseed oil andlead paint, and a number o fat wall paints and enamels
4
witheither an eggshell nish or a gloss were available. Althoughbound distempers were still in common use, the early 1950ssaw the gradual introduction o emulsion paints – these weresometimes reerred to as plastic emulsion, latex paints, poly- vinyl acetate or polystyrene emulsion paints (Chateld 1955:330–38).As ar as the Royal Festival Hall was concerned, it hadbeen thought that the main supplier o the paints might havebeen listed among the individuals and rms credited in the
 Architects’ Journal 
o 10 May 1951 (pp. 613–14), however thisinormation was not published. It is possible that Messrs.Blundell, Spence & Co. Ltd, o 9 Upper Tames Street,London EC4, supplied some material, as their premises wereless than one mile rom the site and a low-key advertisementor the company appears in that issue o the journal (p. 612).It is known that they were selling ‘Pammastic Plastic Emul-sion’ in 1953 (Walters 1953: 587). Equally, their fat enamel‘Pammatt’ or their fat wall paint ‘Bluntone’ could have beenused. Inormation obtained during the second phase o theinvestigation, however, suggested that others may have beeninvolved in the supply o paint.
Findings
A variety o dierent paint types was indeed revealed, butwhat was more surprising was the range o colours and theirdisposition. For, having been painted brilliant white or solong, a combination o dark reds, dull green and brown wasuncovered on the main foor alone.Te initial phase o the project conrmed how a restrictedsampling regime will oen raise as many questions as answers.With six foors and the auditorium to sample, it was not unre-alistic to have been given a list o a limited number o suracesto investigate. However having examined each o the requiredelements there were a lot o unknowns – or example, why was one end o a wall red while the other end was green? Howar did the red extend – was it only on the one foor and howdid it meet the green? Fortunately the client was as keen toollow up the ndings and had allowed sucient time andunds to do so.Space does not permit a detailed account o the technicalanalysis and the more interesting story is perhaps that behindthe original use o colour in the Royal Festival Hall.
5
Te sixcolours that were ound on Level 2 – the main entrance andoyer – can be seen in Figure 1 (cross-sections showing theour predominant colours can be seen in Figs 2–5 below).A total o nine dierent colours was ound on the vari-ous suraces examined on the six foors. Tese were soonidentied as colours that appeared in a paint range that wasproduced in 1955, but this was our years aer the hall wasbuilt. Why had these colours been selected and where hadthey come rom? Te next phase o the research ocused onthis aspect.Te infuence o Le Corbusier on the design o the Royal Fes-tival Hall has been reerred to elsewhere (Frampton 2002: 2)
6
 and it is also known that he visited the site (McKean 2001:6).
7
 Earlier work that I had carried out on a number o 20th-century buildings had introduced me to the two collectionso colour scales designed by Le Corbusier and published inSwitzerland in 1931 and 1959 (Rüegg 1997). I wondered i these had been employed in the selection o colours or theinterior. Using a spectrophotometer, however, a comparisonwas carried out between those colours and the ones encoun-tered in the Royal Festival Hall and only two were ound to be vaguely similar.
8
Tere seemed to be no evidence to suggestthat Leslie Martin and Peter Moro were consciously usingthese as a source, but in spite o this, urther investigation didseem to suggest an indirect link with Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant
Aer the First World War, there had been a similar desire ora ‘return to order’ that was mirrored in architecture. In 1918,Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who had not yet adopted thepseudonym ‘Le Corbusier’, had published a joint maniesto
 Après le Cubisme
with a French painter called Amédée Ozen-ant. Tey termed their new aesthetic approach ‘Purism’, asthey sought to eliminate the picturesque, decorative aspectso Cubism in avour o an art that stressed mathematicalorder, purity and logic. ‘Te war is over, everything is orga-nized, everything is claried and puried; actories rise,nothing is what it was beore the war.’
9
Teir collaborativeideas appeared in print, in
L’Esprit Nouveau
, between 1920and 1925, and many o these were to eature in Le Corbusier’srst our books, o which
Vers une architecture
remains thebest known.Feeling himsel increasingly overshadowed by Le Corbus-ier, Ozenant terminated the collaboration and began teach-ing with the painter Fernand Léger. He later ounded his own
 
246 ARCHITeCTuRAL FInISHeS In THe BuILT envIROnMenT 
atelier, L’ Académie Ozenant, in the residence and studio thatLe Corbusier had designed or him. He moved to London in1936, where he set up the Ozenant Academy o Fine Arts inMay o that year, beore moving to New York some two yearslater (Braham 2002: 2).In the early Purist maniestos, colour was deemed secondary to orm, and this could be seen in the careul placing o colourto reinorce discrete architectural elements by Le Corbusier inhis work o the mid-1920s. However, by the time that he wasin England, Ozenant had rened his ideas about colour andoutlined many o these in the six articles on the subject that hewrote or the
 Architectural Review
. Colour was now regardedas an essential element o architecture, rather than somethingconsidered by the architect while his work was being erected.He elt that colour always modies the orm o the buildingand that it should receive more careul attention:We must endeavour to introduce a little order into thisbusiness, or at least sense into a great deal o it. Butwhat is sense without order? We must try to nd somemethod o arriving at some sort o order – one that willat least enable us to escape rom this vagueness in thedesign o colour (Ozenant 1937a).Ozenant’s revised thoughts on the importance o colourwere partly due to the infuence o the artist Paul Signac andhis theories on Divisionism. Signac maintained that the neo-Impressionist technique o applying brushstrokes obtainedthe maximum brightness, colour, and harmony (Ratcli 1992:207). Unlike the techniques used by the earlier Impressionists,patches o colours remained distinct, blending when viewedat a distance. In this instance, when no usion o the colourstakes place, the interaction is called ‘simultaneous contrast’ , acondition in which colours merely infuence one another by proximity. Tis technique prevents the muddiness or darken-ing that result when patches o colour actually run into eachother. It was an extension o this technique that was recom-mended by Ozenant or achieving ‘colour solidity’ in architec-ture, altering colours visually by contrast to create the illusiono solidity (Braham 2002: 17). Tis notion o ‘solidity’ increas-ingly became an issue as the nature o modern constructionchanged, especially when dealing with such things as the light-weight partition and the glass curtain wall.In 1937 Ozenant had said: ‘I believe that an immense ser- vice would be done to architects, decorators, house-paintersetc., i a chart especially adapted to their particular require-ments were established. Tis chart might contain about ahundred hues’ (Ozenant 1937b). Ozenant’s articles on colourwere read with interest, particularly by:… the students at the Architectural Association (AA),or example, but even or David Medd, a student at theAA who later authored the color standards or Britishschools, Ozenant had already gone to the United Statesby the time he inquired about the course at the Academy (Braham 2002: 51).Te eect o his words can be seen in a number o articles oncolour published in England shortly aer the war. Indeed, weare told in 1956 that they had a direct infuence on some o our post-war schools (Gloag and Medd 1956), which were toprove so infuential.Te name o David Medd
10
appears throughout these post-war years in relation to the use o colour in modern build-
Figure 1
Dispositio o colors o Ll 2.
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uploaded a new revision for this document (#2)

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11 / 12 / 2009
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