The RHS image shows eight blocks of grey tints, with a pure white stripe running across the middle. The numbers on each block show the pixel value that block contains. (That is, the block labeled 251 has red, green, and blue pixel values of 251, 251, 251.) On a perfectly calibrated monitor, you’d be able to distinguish (if only just barely) the difference between the white central row and the block labeled 254. More typically, a “good” monitor would let you see the boundary between the center row and the 250 or 251 block. How many blocks can you see?

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and and ARM’s institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

In Mark Wigley’s “White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture”, a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing—the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design.

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