128 Colors

Dealing with color is a complex subject: influenced by standards, fashions, and trends, we derive our ideas and concepts from color theories, intuition, and personal preferences. The color swatches and systems for describing color common today are based on purely quantitative principles and include well over 1,500 colors. So how do we choose a particular color?

More than ten years ago, the color chemist Katrin Trautwein established a pigment factory, starting out from Le Corbusier’s color palette. She now has more than 900 recipes for paint from which she has proposed – based on her work with architects, designers, and historical preservationists – a selection of 128 colors that produce pleasant results on their own and also combine well. Each color is presented with a sample; their potential uses and significance are also discussed.

Katrin Trautwein has lectured throughout the world on how to approach colors, given seminars, given expert opinions, advised architects, taught painters, and worked as a restorer.

Starting with A. Ruegg’s book Polychromie Architecturale, the American-born chemist studied the recipes of all sixty-three shads that Le Corbusier developed for Salubra between 1931 and 1959. In 1998 she founded the pigment company kt.color in Uster, near Zurich. In 2000 she received an exclusive license from the Fondation Le Corbusier to produce the sixty-three colors as artists’ colors and wall paints (interior and exterior) and to distribute them worldwide. Since then, she has been expanding production, assembling additional color recipes (more than 900 in all), developing a comprehensive palette of whites, working with historically important colors that the industry has neglected (e.g., Yves Klein’s ultramarine blue and Semper’s Pompeian red) but whose use still makes sense today, not only for aesthetic reasons but also economic and ecological reasons. In addition to producing pigments, Katrin Trautwein is a consultant to architects and developers and is asked for second opinions; she also offers regular seminars for architects, interior designers, house painters, and so on, on the subjects such as crafts; color design; pigment colors; principles of materials; the color concepts behind Le Corbusier’s palette; light and shadow colors; new objects, new color concepts, and so on. She is called in for restoration projects to determine colors and provide materials (Le Corbuser’s Maison Blanche, Lux Guyer’s Saffa-Haus, and others); she gives lectures throughout Europe and in the United States.