Public space | Carolina Guillermet

In public interventions, color operates as a constructive force, expanding beyond surface into volume, orientation, and signal. Each intervention responds to the specific logic of its site, engaging circulation, visibility, and the rhythms of collective movement. Through chromatic structures, space is reorganized and perception redefined: color as landmark and passage, as a presence that activates and intensifies the experience of the environment.

Casas Pintadas | San José, Costa Rica | 2004/2006

Casas Pintadas was conceived as a public intervention that redefined twenty houses and commercial façades along one of San José’s main entrances. The project articulated geometry and chromatic intensity not as surface treatments but as volumetric structures, transforming the irregularities of roofs, stairways, and lateral walls into a unified spatial composition.

By treating each façade as a three-dimensional module within a larger chromatic field, the intervention dissolved the idea of painting as decoration and reframed color as a structural force. The neighborhood became a collective canvas, where architecture and community converged into a single aesthetic gesture.

As an early and essential moment in Guillermet’s career, Casas Pintadas anticipated the language of chromatic geometry that has defined her practice for over two decades. Here, color and volume ceased to function as background or ornament; they emerged as active agents capable of reorganizing perception and reconfiguring the lived experience of space.

Clinique des Grangettes. 2012. Geneva.

The commission emerged from a pragmatic constraint: a 9 x 40 meter acoustic wall was required to shield the maternity building from the noise of hospital construction. Rather than accept the wall as a neutral partition, the project reframed it as a chromatic device—a structure whose presence could actively reshape perception.

Eight color booths, each two meters wide, punctuate the façade facing the maternity rooms. The sequence of tonal variations establishes a shifting field of depth, atmosphere, and perspective. In this way, color does not disguise the condition of separation; it intensifies it, converting a technical barrier into a visual and sensorial event.

What was initially a problem of insulation becomes a proposition about the agency of color: how it can mediate space, alter distance, and transform an act of exclusion into a moment of encounter.

Chromatic Orientation Walls HEIG-VD – School of Business and Engineering Vaud, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland | 2014 | Finalist Proposal

The project proposed a chromatic system to articulate the entrances of the School of Engineering complex. A structural grid of rectangular aluminum tubes, double-sided painted in cool and warm hues, established a variation of twelve colors. Depending on the viewer’s position, entries asserted themselves in one register and dissolved into another.

Rather than producing a kinetic spectacle, the intervention reframed color as a tool of navigation and recognition—a way of reorganizing circulation and presence within the campus. By linking perception to movement, the proposal turned access into a sensorial and legible experience.