Introducing Winners of Albers Accessibility Awards

Marlène Samson

We are happy to introduce to you one of the winners of our Albers Accessibility Awards. With the support of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, the awards aim to support the next generation of creative talent in accessing the high-level colour education.

Marlène Samson is an interior architect based in Brussels, with a professional practice extending across Belgium, France and Germany. Currently preparing a PhD in architecture within the LRA at ENSA Toulouse, under the supervision of Andrea Urlberger and Laura Girard, in partnership with Les Chaux de Saint-Astier, one of France’s leading lime and render manufacturers.

Entitled Saying Colour, Making Colour: Urban Colour Charters Challenged by Materiality, the research investigates how colour is being transformed from prescription to built reality. Through a comparative study of the urban colour charters of Toulouse and Bordeaux, the project explores how colour, once defined in regulatory or advisory documents, becomes material, spatial and perceptible architecture.

I am very happy to take part in the workshop Interaction of Colour in Space and to have been selected for the Albers Accessibility Awards. I would like to thank the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, ICA Belgium and the Deutsches Farbenzentrum for supporting and highlighting emerging research such as mine, especially within the context of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, whose legacy resonates deeply with the theoretical foundations of my PhD research.

This work enters into dialogue with the practice of Anni Albers, whose explorations already questioned the relationships between material, fabrication and the perception of colour. Just as weaving allows colour to emerge through structure, fibre and process, lime reveals hues that are intrinsically tied to material composition and modes of fabrication. The research therefore raises a broader question: to what extent can an urban colour charter truly account for the material processes that shape colour itself?

Participating in this workshop, surrounded by specialists such as Maria Zurbuchen-Henz and Juan Serra Lluch, undoubtedly constitutes one of the best possible introductions to my upcoming research project.

-Marlène Samson

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