Cerulean Pipes

Abstract

This paper takes the cerulean monologue delivered by Miranda Priestly, a caricature of Anna Wintour and played
by Meryl Streep in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, as the starting point into an investigation of the use of cerulean blue in the Centre Pompidou project, which follows a comparable authorial lineage. The paper argues that through the use of cerulean blue the building not only reinserted itself back into a pre-existing lineage of the use of the colour within architecture, but also endowed itself with an intermediality that would allow the building to simultaneously exist as building and drawing and thereby enter other media systems. The diagrammatic function of the coloured pipes on the building’s façade allowed it to be read and understood as drawing, which then further allowed for its image to be continuously appropriated and reappropriated by future authors and move facilely across mediums. Building upon a series of precedents from Oscar Nitzchke, Cedric Price, Archigram, and Kenzo Tange, the project materialized what was then an obsession to create architecture that could function as a neutral support for the various programmes it would facilitate and information it would disseminate. If Priestly was to make the speech today, she would thereby be forced to reckon with architecture and accept a building’s position within a system of cultural production beyond its own discipline.

Image: The cerulean sweater monologue in Log 17 (2009) “Observation on the Blues”, in Addressing Architecture and Fashion: On Simulacrum, Time and Poché by Courtney Coffman. Source: Coffman, 2014.