JACOBSEN THE COLORIST

It's a common trope among the cogniscenti that Arne Jacobsen is overrated as a furniture designer and underrated as an architect. I'm not here to dispel any conventional wisdom, but I would like to further point out that he is even more underrated as a colorist.

Architects tend to have a simplistic relationship with color - lots of naked materials, then a strong primary contrast. However Jacobsen is adept at working with a range of tones, often greens and earth tones. Some attribute this to his passion for gardening.

Jacobsen even shows that the architect cliché combo of grey and red can be done with subtlety and sophistication in the Danish National Bank

In the image below,  he makes the classic English conservative green-and-tan palette his own at St. Catherines College, Oxford