Discussion: Glass and Colour -An Interview with Matthias Sauerbruch
"It varies from project to project, but usually a basic idea emerges fairly soon. Reaching a decision in favour of a specific colour or combination of colours is often a lengthy process, however. In the case of the Federal German Ministry for the Environment in Dessau, which will be completed in the near future, we applied various spots or patches of colour to the facade in the first competition model. The idea came from the office complex in Berlin built for the GSW housing developers or from the photonics centre in Adlershof, where the sunshading elements are coloured. The outcome of all this was a coloured glass cladding that is used to conceal functional elements such as night-time ventilation flaps, or that acts as a lining to solid walls. The colour spectrum that runs round the building is subtly differentiated and resulted quite simply from the spatial configuration. It was a long development process, which ran parallel to the almost seven-year planning period." Sauerbruch about the point where colour enters the design process.
