We think of color as decorative, what philosophers call a secondary quality, as opposed to the qualities of form and matter, that exhaust the essence of a thing.

(…) Bodies of colors. Kandinsky made this bodies dance to music, freed colors from the hold of forms. He gave value to color’s plastic, ‚floating‘, variable existence. Likewise, for Greiman, it is the very variable existence of color that gives color power. „From the Center: Design Process at SCI-Arc“, a book that includes texts and images of faculty work at the progressive architectural school, Is a showcase of what colors can do other than just color. White, the background, passive meld against which words and images receive form, here pets her equal share. No longer just a neutral surface upon which the writing is inscribed, or images put, she is rather a physical force, a body that responds to other bodies in an environment. White hugs, and curves around images. It provides a scaffolding for texts. Sometimes white jumps into the spotlight. It becomes the color of text, against a black background, like chalk on an old-fashioned-blackboard (SCI-Arc is after all a school).

Orange becomes the medium for the articulation of a line drawing. Colors collide, express tensions, extend the significance of images. They can give porosity to the text, or enclose a text in a kind of organic wrapper.

The answer to this question appears in her radical treatment of texts. Already, from the „19th Amendment Commemorative Postage Stamp“ project on, it is hard to keep Greiman’s typefaces in place. They seem to posses a kind of eagerness to play multiple roles, to dance, to be part of, as well as so much signage pointing to the action. But with „From the Center: Design Process at SCI-Arc“ texts respond, form a kind of intimate circuit with the images. Sometimes they copy, sometimes they hollow out in precisely the shape of the architectural image they refer to. Sometimes they seem to simply generate from out of themselves their own structure giving a whole new sense to a ‚column‘ of text. All in all, there seems to be an exchange of information between color, text, and image. The same way, for instance, a bee and a flower form an empathic circuit.How can we allow a door through which the observer might pass into the field, not just mentally but sensually, physically? How do we create an environment in, for, play?