Color Mixing by Numbers by Alfred Hickethier (review)

80 Books useful summary of strategies and tactics that are appropriate to historic towns and cities and to historic sectors of larger cities; Geneva comes to my mind. Hans Foramitti and Maximilian Piperek examine Anxietiesof City Dwellers, spending most of their chapter outlining the psychological deficits associated with urban living and offering superficial remedies. It is the firm beliefof Piero Gazzola that ‘thecity ...must again become the agora, the gathering place. hub and heart of the community. an assembly and a place that offers never-ending opportunities for give-and-take between a person and his physical and social environment’. Legislation differs from country to country, and FranGois Sorlin examines some of these differencesand methods adopted to financeconservation. Rehabilitation in France isconsidered in more detail, particularly in respect of the operation of the Malraux Act of 1962. Christopher Tunnard reviews the history of the preservation movement in the U.S.A. Such is the pressure for change and improvement that the Woolworth Building in New York City is now a subject of concern for the preservationists. Particular attention is paid to the problems that have been overcome in preserving the essential character of the French quarter or Vieux Carre of New Orleans, particularly itscentre of Jackson Square. New Orleans is a successstory, a fact to which I can testify. Elsewhere in the U.S.A. progress tends to wear the apparel of the vandal. Bits of preservation, as in Philadelphia, merely tend to sharpen one’s perception of the loss of so much of a heritage. From here on the book becomes more esoteric in its appeal. There is a chapter devoted to two cities in Japan-Kyoto and Nara. Though an interesting chapter, I found it laborious to read due to the profusion of names that I could not pronounce. The Medina of Tunis. lsfahan in Iran and Venice in Italy are the subjectsof the final chapters and will be of interest to those who are familiar with these places or directly concerned with their preservation and welfare. A book of essays by different authors is always difficult to assess. The writing varies in quality and style. There is much information compressed into 183 pages, but what really comes across is the fact that the world’s heritage of cities is threatened, not so much by a lack of concern, but by the perennial inadequacy of financial means. Color Mixing by Numbers. Alfred Hickethier. Trans. from German by F. Bradley. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1970. 40 pp.. illus. f5.55. Reviewed by George A. Agoston* This book was originally published as a teaching aid in German under the title Ein-Mal-Eins der Farbe in 1963. One of its purposes is to explain the 1000-colorsystem introduced by the author a decade earlier. The systemconsists of a cubical array of lo00identical cubes toeach of which is assigneda differentcolor. Four pairs of basic colors (white and black, yellow and purple, red and green, and blue and orange) are assigned to cubes at the eight corners of the array in such a way that one member ofeach pair issituated in a corner cube opposite the other with respect to the center of the array. All the other 992 colors are arranged to exhibit progressive gradations throughout the array. The three sides of the cubical array beginning at the corner occupied by white, terminate at the corners for the three basic colors yellow,red and blue. These three basiccolors are called the primary colors, which are defined by two properties: (I) Each must not contain a trace of either of the two others. (2) When taken in equal proportions. the three colors will mix to form black. Further,when taken in two equal proportions, pairs of the primary colors form the purple, green and orange basic colors. All the other 992 colors include both white and two or three primary colors in their mixture. The 1000 cubes are assigned code numbers ranging sequentially from 000 to 999. These code numbers serve two functions: (1)Theylocateacolor in thecubicalarray. (2)Theydesignate the nominal proportions of white and of the two or three primary *4 Rue Rambuteau. 75003 Paris, France. colorsrequired to prepare the...