There’s more to a city than just concrete, steel and hard work. The color of a city’s architecture and the creativity of its people can turn a dull, functional town into a thing of vibrant beauty. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the radiant neons of Tokyo and beyond, color is a core characteristic of some of the world’s most stunning cities. Urban planning deals with physical layout of human settlements. The primary concern is the public welfare, which includes considerations of efficiency, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, as well as effects on social and economic activities. City planning has had a variable relationship with art, moving between organic, civic minded ideals, and despotic notions of grandeur.
Spanning the history of city planning and city making, the notion of planning as art was in evidence until the mid‐20th century, take for example the exquisite streets of Rome, that was profoundly traced and planned, yet still enrichen with art and expression during the Roman empire, until about the time when modernist spatial ideas took hold. But while art ideas, movements, and style of planning changes in this progressive, fast paced world there is something that never changes, and that is color.
Color is a vital tool for urban preservation, Color and light are one of the most important element that can be easily helped us create legibility and a sense of unity and create the sense of place and cost less than the construction of defined centers. The colorful history of the city, or to be more precise, color palette, helps us until it can be maintained or defined a special color palette for every city which constituent elements are the same color or in a variety of colors used in combination with each other to define face color of urban areas. Thus, this essay will compare and contrast different urban landscapes, from opposite sides of the world and how colour can completely change not only the aesthetics of a certain place, but its personality, that being the emotion created and laid on a human.
Electric colour Tokyo seems like a big, brash, chaotic mega city. A city where the sky was almost permanently grey and space was increasingly limited. For the average foreigner, it takes a while to settle in, and to realise that Tokyo was much more than this, or any of the other cliches you could see in the movies. Tokyo might be big and brash in appearance, but inside it is deeply complex, a spider’s web of emotions; neighbourhoods, personalities and contrasts. But it’s at night when the city blossoms and flourishes the most. Shinjuku is the heart of it, a district surrounded by a sea of neon lights, robot restaurants and mega malls. Above it all, city of twinkling lights, away from the faceless suits and neon seas. Japan’ s heavy use of neon signs and electronic sounds pulsate through the human body. It feel as though one’s insides are vibrating. While exiting the so crowded train stations, one experience a few eye squints as luminous pinks, greens and yellows strobe across the video arcade in the neon neighbourhood of Akihabara, central Tokyo, or as previously said, Shinjuku. Colour and light illuminate a bustling city that never sleeps, yet it’s considered one of the most tranquil and peaceful cities in the world. Neon signs were not a creation and were indeed perfected by French scientist George Claude, and were presented to the public for the first time at the Paris International Exposition held at the start of the 20th century.
About two decades later, in 1926, the first neon signs created in Japan were turned on to become public at Hibiya Park in Tokyo. It was about three-quarters of a century before today. Until then colored light bulbs had been the most prevailing device for illuminations, but the popularization of neon signs brought about a revolution in light source for outdoor advertising, from “point” to “line” and “plane”. Historically, Neon signs have gone hand in hand with Japanese postwar economic development. The Tokyo Olympics was an event, which came to be regarded as a symbol of high-level economic growth in Japan, as Japan became the second biggest economic power in the world, after World War ll. After they were held in 1964, there was an enormous increase in demand for outdoor advertising, and technical innovation occurred in many related fields. This is an easy enough phenomenon to observe: the visual images showing economic development at that time are invariably accompanied by pictures of urban scenes full of neon signs.
Many and many companies, from small to globally large were requesting to taint their establishments with pinks, red and green, flooding and drowning the city in vast amounts of light that, until today, has never cease to amaze the global community. The neon sign had become the symbol of peace and economic development. However, Tokyo contrasts their flagrant electric colours, with their colour of Japan’s past. It is amazing to being able to see a great, urban modernity and traditional buildings that make up the Largest city’s landscape. Colour is a great characteristic in many of these traditional buildings that are still surviving in the middle of the urban landscape, and religions was what shaped these buildings. Red came to be associated with authority and wealth, as attested to by red-sheathed samurai swords and ornamental combs. It also has ties to religion, as demonstrated by the red torii of Shinto shrines, whose shrine maidens are traditionally clad in red hakama 袴はかま. Shinto shrines make up a lot of the Urban landscape of Japan, with colours contrasting from the plain and monotone, highly raised developments all over Tokyo. In summary, Colour plays a big part in Tokyo’s personality.
Colour and light not only creates legibility, a sense of unity and builds a sense of place, but it also brings emotions; neighbourhoods full of personalities and contrasts. A city truly alive. Monochrome: A generic city. Color represents a city’s heritage. New York holds a brown/reddish color reputation from its classic brownstone buildings, found all over the city but most famously, in Brooklyn and Harlem, and on the Upper West Side. Elizabeth Dillon, a principal at the Historical Concepts architecture firm in New York and a fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, describes the brownstone tradition started after the great fire in 1835, in an effort to find an affordable material that was more durable than wood, due to wood being extremely flammable, yet a fundamental material in American construction.
During the 20th century, Brownstone became the predominant middle-class building material as marble was a little too rich, and limestone would have to be imported from farther away, so that’s where brownstone came in. Brownstone, which traditionally came from upstate New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, is a fluke of nature: It’s a sandstone that’s particularly dark due to its high iron content. Brownstone is a huge part of New York City architecture today, but other materials have also composed the aesthetics of the New Yorker landscape, such as Black metal work, as well as bronze, brass, and golden oak, which are added to enrich the scheme. As an attempt to work with a limited color palette, bringing in richness with texture and patterning Different spaces affect your mood in different ways, based on the colors, light, textures, and forms that characterize them. These effects can be either subtle or they can be dramatic, but they are stale, not subjective. Whether or not you like the design of a space, its different aesthetic elements can combine to feel stimulating or relaxing, comforting or jarring, festive or serene or somber. Sometimes our responses to our environment are unconscious, so that we don’t even realize it’s the aesthetics that are making us feel a certain way, and instead attribute it to the things that are going on in our lives or the company we’re in at a given moment.
Architecture in New York is this very same way. Due to very gloomy colours, New York is often portrayed as a very gloomy and boring city, despite how lively and continuous is. Colours and the repetition of them create an illusion of a very constricted place, with too much order and perhaps no freedom at all. No freedom to escape from the comfort zone to create, polychrome, wacky structure that will revitalize the eyes of many expectant souls that already leave a rather monochrome and single-lined life. Always looking at the same will create a sense of boredom, which leads to a lack of motivation and therefore, depression.
When the external world fails to engage our attention, we can turn inward and focus on inner, mental landscapes. Boredom, it has sometimes been argued, leads us toward creativity as we use our native wit and intelligence to hack bor¬ing environments to create interest. But streetscapes and buildings designed to generic functional requirements cuts against the grain of our ancient, inbuilt need for novelty and sensation. Boring architecture may take an emotional toll on the people forced to live in and around it, which is not what is desired to experience during one’s lifetime. Conclusion The relevance of art to city planning needs to be reinvigorated, but this will require new ways of thinking, an acceptance of traditionalism broadly defined, and may entail new conceptions about the merger of planning with recent cultural and even scientific theory.
Aesthetic in all of the human condition is an important part of perception and action and human life and combination of elements of man-made and natural is just manifestation of the aspirations and thought of society. The beauty of city is not only affected by buildings but the form their relation to each other, walled city, public centers and visual qualities are also important. Social cohesion is town’s main function, so the city should belong to the public, Physical environmental is integrity that I am a part of it, our perceptions followed of this integrity and make a beautiful appearance
