Australia Modern: Architecture, Landscape & Design 1925–1975

hued atrium in Peter Behrens’s Administration Building for Hoechst, a chemical company known for their dyes. Completed in 1924, it would appear to be a key source for the use of colour in the interiors of brick-faced civic and office structures erected across northern Germany during in the 1920s, a corpus she ignores. These are now often described as Expressionist, but they emerged from a less self-conscious position in which neither the state or capitalism were subject to much interrogation. Also absent, because her focus is quite explicitly on paint, is the story of the coloured light that jazzed up the nightscapes of many German cityscapes in these years, or the vivid use that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich made of intensely hued silks and velvets, as well as onyx and rosewood. But within the limits she sets herself, Barnstone tells an important story about the avant-garde’s original inspirations and ambitions and tells it very well.