The role of colour in historic urban open space design: Tabriz-Iran

Colour, or the concept of colour, can be approached from different perspectives and different disciplines, such as the natural sciences, colour theory, technology, philosophy, biology, medicine, psychology, and art. Colour is not the property of objects, spaces, or surfaces; it is the sensation caused by certain qualities of light that the eye recognizes and the brain interprets. Colour, which is the reflective production of light on diverse materials, makes the world colourful. The colours of the surrounding will arouse different feelings in people with the change of the quality of the colour. In addition, a specific colour can give people certain sense of distance, weight and scale. The most significant field is urban colourscape, colour research is beginning to pay more consideration to how people have different physiological reaction to different colour and colour can be used for the urban dwellers to create a pleasing, livable and comfortable environment. But it may have been forgotten in some urban designs or maybe colour is used inappropriately. So which points could be important in selecting suitable colour for an urban open space design? No Considering colour pallet of the buildings of every city, arouse a debate related to identity and aesthetics of urban environment. This debate is succeeded by researches about the color of cities, from limited hues of traditional city to numerous colors of modern city. Phillipe Lenclos was the first one who after dedicating many years to the color subject, innovated a method of surveying color of cities; which is used by anyone who is researching in this field. In some cities which have urban renewal projects, use of colour may be the best choise to make visual sense and also change the whole perpective of that environment. By this way, designers can make an attractive environment and dynamic aspects. Also they can eliminate the monotonious gray of concerete from the city or region. This time, such chromatic idea will take place in Iran, Tabriz that is one of the historic cities of Iran. This is now just as a municipality idea to make chromatic slum façade development. The base point comes from Tabriz and its attempt to be the only tourism Islamic city up to the end of 2018. So, there are some city renewal projects, such slum developments, shopping malls, crossroads, pedestrian road and etc. During evalution the related documents, colour theme can be seen in slum façade improvement project but with some limited information. The cited purpose of use colourful designin such region az just speed up the development process and it may be without any considiration about background of city or just that region. Now, the idea of using colour in this study comes from evalution of different city projects. And because some information about such projects are gathered before in case of curiosity and interest in colour and components that relatet to it, when encounter the colour them in the hometown, it was enough attractive to start research about this item.xviii However, in this study, the central street that is located in the historic first core of the city is selected as the case study. Here, the main and crowded street will be chnaged to the wide and important pedestrian road. By researching other countries, all of them have an idea and concept about their own chromatic design in similar open spaces that could be place of most of visitors. So, in this street what can we do to make an attractive and livable environment beside preserving the identity and history of the area. To achieve the better solution some studies that based on histoy, culture, identity, perception, function of colour and urban colourscape are helded in this research. And the main guideline is method of Lenclos and using his methodology on four main approaches; culture, perception, function and urban colourscape. By surveyin and prepairing questions, taking digital photos and analysing these photographs by Adobe Capture Application, the colour of environment can be gained. This application can analysis the picture that is uploaded and after processing, output information can represent the colour with its features. In this regard colour system, such RGB, CIELab, CMYK, and NCS are achieved. In this study, CIELab got used because it is most closely aligned with human color vision compared to other systems. Beside the collective colours from environment, by making questionnaire, what people think about the area is ghatered too and by this way their idea and what they want to see in the pedestrian road turned out. Generally, in the aim of presreving the history and identity of the site, it is better to treat carefully and concidering the main points, such back ground of the city and it is better to have some limitation to use colour, in order to keep the environment balanced. To do this, may be one point can be the contiuing the historic samples, local material or colours that reflex the locality.