Art and Colour in the Requalification of Urban Areas and Landscapes

For contemporary research, peripheral realities, urban voids or dismantled areas and structures represent important opportunities for urban regeneration and redevelopment. The Color, through the “Color Design”, becomes an approach that can achieve remarkable and immediate results with low cost. It is capable of transforming the visual impact of a building, a road, an entire neighbourhood; it orientes and creates harmony through the Visual rules and hierarchies, it can recover the identity and image of a place; it can highlights and enhances paths, obstacles, zones, functions, services, or informs through their universally recognizable codes. Even today, Bruno Taut’s idea of improving the quality of life in popular neighborhoods with the creation of polychrome architectures is a reference: the color therefore constitutes the “accessible” decoration even for the most deprived areas. Like Color, Art is a tool for social and urban upbringing. Nowaday, Art no longer needs to be confined in museums or galleries, but can be placed outdoors in an urban or landscape dimension, becoming public art (made of installations and large sculptures). The contribution, through the study of critically selected and analyzed case studies, tends to verify the validity of this thesis, confirming that Art and Color constitute both retraining tools and valuable media to promote the recognition of sites and services, attraction poles, urban presence, constituting a real urban communication strategy, without forgetting the role of social and cultural exchanges. Of course, the great challenge will be to combine, if possible, the above approaches with the “ways of sustainability”.