Painting Architecture

This thesis explores the intersection of painting and architecture, using Napier as a site for inquiry. Despite a foundational influence, painting has been largely abandoned by contemporary architects. Art Deco, a style influenced partly by Cubism, with its geometric forms, traces one of its roots to painting. In this sense, Napier is a city shaped by many arts. This research uses Napier’s roots in painting as a vehicle to examine the role of painting within my creative processes and the potential painting has to enrich architecture.

Where might my painting practice lead me? How might it play out in the design of a new combined museum, theatre, and gallery? What could it mean for the city? I have used painting as a generator to merge the creative freedom I find in painting with architecture’s function through three design phases. Through site-responsive paintings, I distilled some of Napier’s architectural gestures into a language of abstract forms that informed my design process, drawing on approaches from modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Barragán. Building on this, I explored this visual language through elemental arrangements and bold blocks of colour, expanding my approach to include collage, sketching, and digital modelling as complementary methods.

I found my use of space and colour are not separate but part of the same creative gesture, able to be formed into a unified expression. This project reveals colour as inherently spatial, not merely decorative. This transformed my perception of Napier from a city rooted in heritage to a place where creative disciplines can intersect, exploring the potential of cross-disciplinary practices to shape its future.