The importance of colors in the urban landscape.

Colors influence several environments: with pre-established functional goals, they make them more pleasant, stimulate consumption and guide the flow of people.
In the urban landscape, colors may play a social role. Used with planning in floors, sidewalks, walls, streets and buildings, they renew spaces and reflect the culture of the place. It is a unique language among other architectural resources that requires the development of meanings for each corner and urban tribe, thus highlighting the city and its inhabitants.  

An example is the Epopéia Paulista Project, created by painter Maria Bonomi, which took place in 2004, as part of the celebration of the 450^th anniversary of the city of São Paulo, when the artist was invited to create a work of art in the gallery that integrates the railway station and the Luz Subway Station.

The work, which was produced in colored concrete, clearly presents the “ideal Combination” referred to by Lutz Kohnert, World Product Manager of LANXESS’s inorganic pigments division, in his text "Architectonic Concrete and Colors – An Ideal Combination", clearly demonstrating the possibility of aligning concrete shapes to the values conveyed by colors. This is why the bottom of the work, which symbolized the land of coffee and its European immigrants, was pigmented with Red 118M Bayferrox, and the top, which represented the dry land, of Northern migrants was pigmented with Yellow 918LO Bayferrox.

The artist’s work could be closely followed up by the audience during an event that occurred at the MAC USP, where the whole production process of the work was exhibited, from the first sketches to the shaping of the concrete board.

The artist used the illustration painting process, where objects such as suitcases, bicycles and musical instruments were placed on a wooden matrix that was the work’s frame. Today, the work fascinates common observers with its shapes and colors, and even blind people, who can feel the work with their hands.