Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Whether it was in a cave, an early Minoan palace or an American Federalist home, people have always looked to bring color and design into their living spaces. Both science and psychology influence the art of marrying style and pigment: ?Nature has always provided the visual stimulation of color, light and texture, while history has shown the human need for variety and change,? writes Rompilla in her breathless survey of 3000 years of architecture, art history, color theory and science. Complementing an eclectic assortment of 125 illustrations (including 95 in color), the text is concise, lucid and well-organized. Such an ambitious synthesis could have easily become either chaotic and dense or thin and overly simplistic, but Rompilla hits all the highlights and stays on point, even when covering Aristotle in a few lines: ?He believed that the rainbow had only three fixed, or primary colors: red, green and blue (although yellow was visible), and he assigned these three primaries to pigment as well.? Broad ranging despite its brevity, her introduction to the study and practice of color for interiors leaves the reader with the sense of the complexity and depth of the subject?and might inspire some to study further. Except for a few anomalies, such as an out-of-focus photograph of Josef Hoffmann?s Palais Stoclet, the art is well-chosen, nicely reproduced and beautifully incorporated into the book?s coffee-table format. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
Using color in the home can be intimidating, especially for an amateur. These two books present an abundance of information on how to choose colors and what types to use in the home. Whereas Tom Helme and Joseph Friedman's Paint and Color in Interior Decoration focused on the history and examples of color in interior decoration, Rompilla (color theory, New York Sch. of Interior Design) gives a more comprehensive study of color and its use in interiors. She discusses the historic, artistic, and psychological aspects of color as well as explanations on how texture, tone, and light affect it. She also describes how color has been used in the 20th century by both architects and designers. Starmer (Swatch Selector) discusses how to use color effectively in interiors and devotes the majority of The Color Scheme Bible to descriptions of 200 color schemes for the home. The main colors are given in a table-of-contents format where one can select a color and then turn to its page to find suggested room use, different tones of the main color, and accent and highlight colors, as well as the type of mood or look conveyed by each choice. One drawback is the lack of illustrations showing the color scheme used in an actual room, as Starmer provided in Swatch Selector. Color for Interior Design is recommended for large interior design collections, while The Color Scheme Bible is highly recommended for public libraries. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
