Exploring Architecture Through Painting

“I like color. I’m not afraid to use it.”
Will Alsop

Best known for his flamboyant and often controversial buildings the British architect Will Alsop often uses painting as the entry point for his building designs.

As he states in his book The Noise "One of the reasons for painting is that you are not really in control of what you are doing - and that interests me a lot. Instead of having a specific starting point, which perhaps, in architectural terms, would lead through to a series of logical thoughts working towards a designed building, you can start anywhere." 

It is a process that enables Alsop to create his architectural designs with their unusual forms and colors.

As Tom Bloxhma, the chairman of the developer Urban Splash, who have used several of Alsop’s designs, told the Guardian Newspaper "His architecture has always looked like sculptural painting. It was always big swirls of the brush and big gestures."

And for Alsop, his painting and his architecture are intricately interwoven in his life of "drawing, painting, dreaming and working on architecture."

As he explained to The Guardian Newspaper’s Steve Rose “Painting to me is a way of exploring architecture. It's all the same thing. If I spent all my time painting, it wouldn't mean I'd given up thinking about architecture. I can sit in my studio on a Saturday morning and find something on a large piece of paper, and the feeling that you get is almost as good as having finished a building that's turned out all right. It's not about designing something, it's about discovering what something could be – and I think that's a very important distinction."

Alsop’s current exhibition Making Life Better is on show at Munich’s Art & Space Gallery until the 6^th of February 2016.