Three questions for arkMILL

Tapio Antikainen and Esa Viitanen are the partners of arkMILL, a Finnish office based in Kerava, just north of Helsinki. Much of their work is related to swimming pools and spas, and they have worked a lot with tiles in general and Agrob Buchtal tiles in particular. Illustrated here is a sketch they have made using the new ChromaPlural cool color range.

about: Can you tell us something about your ideas concerning color in architecture?

Tapio Antikainen: We like to use colors as large elements in space. So it is rarely just a color accent which we add, we want it to be clearly present. For us, colors have an important communicative role, especially in public buildings, where you can use them to offer visitors and users orientation, without relying on a system of signage of arrows and words. And we sometimes deliberately use strongly contrasting colors in order to assist visually-impaired people in finding their way.

about: Is color something fashionable for you? Is your own preference changing?

Tapio Antikainen: We try to avoid short-term trends because unlike shops and restaurants, indoor swimming pools and the materials they are made of are supposed to last a long time.

about: Color is one important means for creating atmospheres. Can you describe what kind of atmosphere you are looking for in pools?

Esa Viitanen: We aim to create spaces which make pools and water look as attractive and tempting as possible. Matching colors, like those of ChromaPlural, create harmony and offer the possibility to achieve peaceful and calm spaces for people. For us, light – both natural and artificial – is a very important tool as well. In Finland, we have long and dark winters and very long days during the summer period so we always have to think of both extreme conditions when we design, and to keep in mind the completely different light conditions and their effects on forms and colors.

Balanced ambience

And thirdly, there is the color that stands out, “incidents”, as van Maanen calls them. These colors are deliberately prominent and in the forefront. Even though there is a tendency to emphasise manifest colors in architecture, many interiors are in fact determined by the general and specific color character. Van Maanen argues that color incidents are easy to achieve. Any color that doesn’t really fit in is attributed a manifest presence. Yet the atmosphere of built spaces is not defined by the exception to the rule, but rather by the balanced relationship between colors. ChromaPlural’s UNICOLOR certainly does not exclude color contrasts where a designer deems them necessary for a project; but fundamentally, it is a system that offers the tools to create a chromatically balanced ambience which does not necessarily need to stand out to be noticed. This might sound paradoxical but it is the self-effacing aspect of ChromaPlural’s colors which gives them a timeless stylishness. Just like fashion, color preferences change over time, but as in fashion, some things never lose their appeal because as the great couturier Yves Saint-Laurent famously said: “Fashions fade but style is eternal.”

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