The Color Black: Antinomies of a Color in Architecture and Art

Join Head Hi and MACK as we host author, architect and educator Mohsen Mostafavi and designer Sean Canty for an afternoon book launch and conversation on this newly released publication exploring the use and possibilities of the color black across art and architectural histories.

More about the book:

This publication traces a theoretical and visual narrative of the relationship of art and architecture with the colour black through two engaging essays by acclaimed architect and critic Mohsen Mostafavi and the Marxist German art historian Max Raphael (1889–1952). Bringing together a rich inventory of images, Mostafavi considers architecture’s connection with the colour by considering parallel developments in global art practices – with references ranging from Japanese screens to Rothko, Georgia O’Keefe to Kara Walker, Peter Celsing to Derek Jarman. Alongside these renowned touchpoints, he draws on Raphael’s little-known and highly distinctive text The Color Black: On the Material Constitution of Form, based on a selection of old master paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Contemporaneous with the evolution of black paintings by New York’s Abstract Expressionists, Raphael’s essay offers a strikingly different approach to the same multivalent subject. Raphael offers an invigorating model of criticism, which, in John Berger’s words, ‘leads us from the work to the process of creation which it contains’.

This book presents Mostafavi’s and Rapahel’s complementary and luminous essays side by side, the latter published in English for the first time in a compelling translation by Pamela Johnston. They are completed by conversations with Swiss architect Peter Märkli, whose use of black is informed by Raphael’s writings, and the artist Theaster Gates, whose work explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of the colour. Juxtaposing the present with the recent and distant past, this book provides a many-layered reading of the colour black – and of colour more widely – in relation to contemporary architectural thinking and practice.

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Mohsen Mostafavi is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He served as the dean of the faculty of design between 2008 and 2019. An architect and educator, his work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics. Mostafavi is the author and editor of many books, including Ecological Urbanism (co-edited 2010 and translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); In the Life of Cities (2012); Architecture is Life (2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); Portman's America & Other Speculations (2017); and Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017); Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World (2023).

Sean Canty is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Canty founded Studio Sean Canty in 2017, an architectural practice that introduces novel geometries and materials to enrich the spaces of everyday life—from residential and cultural programs to public space. Canty is also cofounder of Office III, an architectural collective that was a finalist in the 2016 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Competition. Recent projects include the Governor’s Island Welcome Center in New York (2017). Canty received a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from California College of the Arts. Canty previously worked in the offices of Architecture Research Office and IwamotoScott Architecture.

Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events. 

Presented with MACK, an independent publisher of award-winning books on contemporary art, critical theory, film and architecture. They work with pioneering creative minds and institutions across the globe and pride ourselves on the rigour and care that goes into every stage of the book-making process.