Natural ultramarine blue, extracted from lapis lazuli, is one of the most expensive pigments in the world. Omnipresent as the colour of the sky, for ages blue is associated with the divine, the mystical, the vast, the incomprehensible, the immaterial. The significance of the colour blue in art and literature has been well researched: from the 12th century onwards, for example, it was repeatedly found in highly charged iconographic form in the depiction of the Mantle of Mary; romantic literature even went in a never-ending search of the "blue flower".

Blue in architecture, on the other hand, which is obviously very rarely used, has never been examined in detail. The decision for a blue house is usually not a natural or even accidental one; after all, the blue colour in most cases does not result from the basic building material, but is artificially applied in the form of paint, plaster or glaze.

In the past semesters we have systematically dealt with the search and find, interpretation and documentation of blue architecture from the 1st millennium BC to the present in the context of various elective modules and fields of research. In this way, a small treasure of knowledge on blue architecture has been created across cultural and typological boundaries, which is to culminate in an English language atlas on the same topic.

Participants of this field of research have the opportunity to actively participate in the preparation of the book publication. The main focus of the work – from graphic tasks to researching illustrations to writing your own small contributions – will be specified individually. Interested persons should of course have a keen interest in the topos of blue in architecture and should also be interested in basic editorial work (which includes graphic, textual and organizational tasks). In case of preliminary questions, do not hesitate to contact Verena Hake.